Generation Y?

• Emily Lyons, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2015

BUZZ! BUZZ! BUZZ!
I wake up to the buzz and blinding light of my I phone 6 plus. I turn down my warm and cosy sheets as I lean as far as I can to reach my phone.
I grab the phone with my sweaty palm, press the power button as my display lights up my pale face, and it is my grandma. She needs help typing a document on her computer so I get up out of my bundle of heat, slip on my ugg boots and walk across the dark grass…the dew caressing my face…to my grandma’s cosy shack, open the enormous wooden door and enter.
I notice her face is two centimetres away from the monitor and it isn’t on. I giggle as I walk up to her and reach my hand out onto the button and press it down. My Grandma looks at me as if I was magic.
“Kids these days, they know how to work everything”, she sighed.
“When I was little we had none of this fancy and complicated technology” she said shaking her petite head from side to side. I walk out of the shack and slowly close the door behind me.

When I sat down and really thought about technology and what my grandma told me, I recall her saying how they had to write their assignments on a piece of paper. How she used to have to write pages and pages of work without summarising it, how they researched with books and they had no internet to communicate and I think how lucky we are to live in this world. We are able to express ourselves, have amazing resources and contacting someone is just a button away.
I then think how silly we are for obsessing over apps and items on our phone, worrying about how many people are following us, how many people share our photo and how many people likes we get on a photo. This generation follow everyone else like sheep. We are scared to be individuals and be ourselves. We are scared to be up standers because we will get bullied. We care about what other people think of us, when we should just be worrying about how we see ourselves.

Today, we need to change, take a stand and make it right. We don’t need to be like everyone else, Wear the new trend ,have the same hair as everyone or have the latest phone, what we need is a brighter tomorrow and stop hiding behind our phones.
BUZZ! BUZZ!
This time I turn off the display, walk outside and enjoy the real beautiful things in life.
Generation Y, it is our time.