Kahar+M’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2016


 * Know There Eye Color? **

You are at the movies with your best friend. The theater starts to dim but you and your friend don’t notice because you are still tweeting about the movie you are soo excited to see. Faintly you begin to hear the ever notorious theater voice saying “Our world seems to be over run with technology. There is a time and place for it, but a movie theater is not the time nor the place. OMG and LMAO on a bright little screen in a dark theater disrupts those around you. You know who you are and so do we.”

You may be thinking that this is going to be another technology rant and maybe it is slightly, but before you go on assuming, I want you to do something. Close your eyes, Then I want you to raise your hand only if you know for sure the eye color of both your seat partners. Open your eyes. It may not seem like a big deal but not knowing the eye color of others around us is gigantic sign of social problems affecting our generation and onward. When 2,000 men were questioned about whether they thought they knew their partner, 6 out of 10 said they were confident that they knew their other half. However statistics showed that only 12% of the men knew their partner’s eye color.

The reason our society is so prone to forget the eye color of others around us is because of the extraordinary amount of time we look down at our screens and ourselves i.e selfies. Now I have no problem with the technology we use, however I do have a problem with friends looking at their phones while we are at a social event, or hanging out. Sure you may be texting your mom but that case is rare because we mostly spend our time scrolling through pictures on insta, watching six second videos on Vine, and imposing filters on snapchat stories. We tweet hit me up only to disregard others when they do hit us up. Spending that time instead to tweet how much fun you are having. How might I ask would you know you are having fun if you spend the majority of the time glued to your phone looking through everyone else who is “having the time of their lives”? We live our lives through our social media. We exude your personality with a tweet, post, or filter and rarely live in the present moment with others around us.

The stories my parents tell me never have had social media or phones at the forefront and sure you guys may be thinking that my parents are from a different generation to which I would respond that you are absolutely correct. But look back at your life and remember the good times because I guarantee that you won’t remember that one time where you hung out with a friend scrolling through your phone and completely ignoring your friend. The memories you do remember will be those times where you cry with your friends. Crying because of pain you felt but also because of pure joy you experienced. You will remember the most embarrassing moments of your childhood. You will remember The first time you could ride your bike on your own, the first time you scored a goal and you ran around the field screaming, your first kiss and for that matter your first boyfriend or girlfriend. You will remember the first everything, But you won’t remember who liked your latest selfie first or who screenshotted your snapchat, or favorited your tweet because these things are very irrelevant to the person you will become and quite frankly to the person you are now. We spend so much of your time creating a “perfect” persona that when you are face to face with others we know nothing about our real self and hide behind the one thing we are comfortable with, our phone.

I see people out in public who are alone surrounded by strangers. Instead of having the courage to meet their eye or interact with them, they instead choose to look down at their phones. I am personally guilty of this and the worst part is that we don’t do anything on your phone, we simply look down at it because somehow behind that screen you aren’t alone. Behind that screen you can share whatever artificial irrelevant superficial crap you want and feel completely secure. When you get down to the heart of the matter behind that screen you aren’t vulnerable to new ideas, new emotions, and most importantly you aren’t vulnerable to new people. At one point in our lives we must shake the shackles of this fear and emerge with all our faults because when that moment comes you can really begin to live. You can begin to interact with others around you and really begin to create friendships that can last forever. You can find a connection where before you perceived to be an empty space of awkwardness.

I want you to close your eye once again and imagine the America I want to grow old in. An America where there is human to human interaction. Where instead of seeing a group of teenagers all on their phones you see young adults laughing with their phones put away and social media out of their minds. I want to live in a world where that mysterious theater voice is non existent because going on your phone when at the movies with your friend is considered taboo. At the end of the day I want everyone in this room to realize that your real eyes mean more to me, more to everyone around you than the real lies of how phones have set us up to be.


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