Smartphones — or spacephones, as I like to call them — have brought us the future, but they’ve also created a black hole into which our attention spans are disappearing. May is soon, exams loom — how am I supposed to study when my spacephone peels my brain in 40 directions?

I know I’m not alone. We are a generation of spacephone addicts. I’m reminded of it when I go to a movie and the rows ahead of me are dotted with glowing rectangles. I’m reminded of it when I see a couple at a restaurant, avoiding conversation and eye contact because they are lost in the Twitterverse. We use our phones to ignore each other, to ignore our environment and to sink deeper into ourselves. As a result, we’re becoming less interesting people. The spacephone black hole is sucking the color from our personalities. And that includes me. I’m the most boring person in the world, I swear to God.

It’s not just our attention spans at stake. We’ve become a generation that avoids confrontation because it’s so much easier to ignore the more difficult traits of the people in our lives. If someone you’re talking to is being annoying, you can just disappear into your phone. That’s not healthy. Face-to-face confrontation is good. It solves problems.

But the Internet gives us anonymity, so we’ve become a generation of critics who consume and consume. We’re all willing to judge something without creating something, and I fear people who actually do have that rare enterprising spirit soon will become extinct.

And the problems root in us earlier than ever before. Look around today. All minivans now have TVs in them. Families on road trips don’t even have to talk to each other anymore. What a damn shame. I did some of my best, most life-defining thinking when I was a smelly little kid, bored out of my mind in the back of my mom’s minivan. I built an imagination. I daydreamed about being Han Solo and making out with Princess Leia. I created worlds in my head. I wouldn’t have experienced any of that growth if every time my mom took me to Costco, a dumb screen popped out of the dashboard and injected Spongebob SquarePants into my eyeballs.

But now I’m the guy checking Twitter at the urinal. I’m not above any of this. Believe me, scores of mindless YouTube videos separated the writing of each sentence in this column. I knew it was bad when I signed up for Vine. I can’t even sit through a five, sometimes four-second video without itching to swipe to the next one.

My life exists in the gaps between spacephone notifications. I get nothing done. I pine for the days when I was 9 years old and it took a full minute to log onto the Internet. Remember that electronic, crunching, whirring sound your computer would make as it dialed up? Today, I’d take that minute to wonder, “Why are you doing this to yourself? What are you doing with your life? You don’t need to look at pictures of cats with moustaches.”

I’m attracted to and fascinated by people who don’t share my addiction to the point where I’ve lowered the bar for the opposite sex. The other day, I saw a girl sitting on a bench (phone secured in pocket!) reading a book (ears: headphoneless!) and I almost fell in love on the spot. “This chick’s got it all figured out.”

Spacephones are a drug separating us into two kinds of people: Those who know when to switch them off, and addicts who check Twitter while pissing. Is the answer to cut yourself off? To limit yourself to an hour of spacephone use a day? To have a no-spacephone day of the week? These all seem impractical.

My modest proposal also is a lazy one: do nothing. Lay in bed and stare at your ceiling. You’ll be surprised where your mind wanders without your spacephone forcing its direction. Let it roam unhindered by the direction of a Twitter feed. Let yourself be the smelly kid in the back of the minivan who had an imagination. You will drift to the corners of your mind that aren’t stimulated anymore. Self-propelled and independent, your brain might heal and become rigid again.

Thank God I’m done with this column. I’ve got some Twitter to catch up on.

Drew Dzwonkowski is the design editor at The State News and a journalism senior. Reach him at dzwonko5@msu.edu.