Let’s talk about your phone battery. It’s dying. It’s dying RIGHT NOW. Soon enough it will be totally without juice and you will be banished from the online world. No texts. No Instagram stories. No Doodle Jump. Just you, alone. So alone….
Now, of course, I’m being over-dramatic about the mundane occurrence of a phone battery running out of charge. OR AM I?
The fact is that battery anxiety is a very real phenomenon. People with electric cars often suffer from “range anxiety,” the fear of running out of power before getting to the destination. While not everyone has an electric car, almost everyone has a wireless phone. And a lot of those folks suffer from “nomophobia,” the fear of being without a phone. Nomophobia is short for no mobile phone phobia, and it was coined in 2010 in a government survey that found 53% of people reported significant anxiety when they lose their phone or run out of battery life.
Here are some other stats from studies about how tethered to phones we are:
65% of people sleep next to their phones.
34% reported that they have answered their phones during……um…..intimate activity.
More than half people NEVER turn off their phone
There is even a viral story (almost certainly not true) about a young girl unplugging her grandfather’s life-support so she could charge her phone. The thing about this story is that many people have no problem believing it, which is a sign of how pervasive nomophobia is.
There is even an app specifically focused on nomophobia. It’s called Die With Me, and it’s a messaging app that only works when your battery is at or below 5% charged!