As athletic or lethargic or as high or low as our grades may be, I doubt there is a single student on this campus who hasn’t spent at least one long night hunched over a phone or laptop, either procrastinating or striving to finish their work in time. This enraptured state where our retinas slowly burn from our eyeballs cannot be healthy—we all know it. Many, including myself, wear glasses to correct our vision, while others opt for contacts. There are only so many of us whose eyesight remains unscathed, free from the need for correction.

Rubbing your eyes at the line where night and morning blur, putting the finishing touches on that essay due in three hours, it’s not just our eyes that suffer. As our sleep schedules deteriorate throughout the semester, we are further reminded of the toll our busy lives take on us. I, for one, haven’t managed to sleep for nine hours on a weekday without missing a class. Such a luxury is beyond what my internal clock—and my workload (which, admittedly, is self-inflicted)—would allow.

The sad truth is that I know I’m not the only student on this campus in such a state—if anything, I might be among the less severe cases. I’m in the College of Arts and Sciences with four course credits this semester; I don’t have any labs and only a single recitation. Every day, while I see many students with bright eyes and energetic smiles, I see just as many—if not more—with dark circles under their eyes, trudging along on the fuel of coffee and a drive strong enough to challenge fate itself.

With all this constant striving towards our goals, another question arises: what about the students’ need for recreation? After all, our school is known for both working hard and playing hard, and the weekend parties certainly offer plenty of playtime. But during the quiet hours of the week, who do we turn to?

Mr. Phone, at your service.

Whether it’s Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Quora, 4chan, Rumble, Twitch, YouTube or even MySpace, we consume some form of short, rapid-reward content. The scorched husks left behind in our minds speak volumes about the effects. A new generation is growing up with the attention span of a turnip, and those of us already here are the harbingers of the most rapid age humanity has ever seen. A plague of instant gratification is upon us, and it threatens to consume society as we know it.

Even now, I glance warily at this computer as I write; it’s 27 minutes before my next class, and soon, I’ll have to focus even harder on this screen. I yearn for a break that I know will never come—because, in truth, I don’t want it.