I have worked at a local fine dining restaurant as a bus boy for the last half year, and you could say that when I’m not setting tables or filling up water glasses, it’s very easy to catch myself “people watching.”

It’s not difficult to start to casually people watch around a room, but sometimes the eyes lock onto certain anomalies. If you take a second to glance at that sweater that looks like someone ripped it off Party City’s carpet, or the classy look of that top which doesn’t quite want to part ways with its sales tag, or the gentleman who seems to have a chewing technique similar to that of a camel, it can be quite easy to catch yourself staring.

However, egregious as all these examples seem, there is one broken societal rule that draws the most stares from my coworkers and I: the dreaded phone addict.

Yes, we’ve all seen them, and maybe even inadvertently received a menacing scowl when we’ve “run into them” because their noses were buried in the three by five screen that they seemed to have thought was the sidewalk.

Nonetheless, the cases of phone addiction where I work are far too many… and I’m noticing it even as a seventeen year old who has grown up in the cell phone world.

Kids, approximately ages 7 through 18, have a gourmet meal in front of them surrounded by the company of family and friends, and they simply text, play games, tweet, snapchat (that one is always fun to watch), or do absolutely anything to take them away from the dinner table and closer to their devices. It’s actually quite mind-boggling how they can find that much stuff to do.

But my sightings are only a microcosm of the entire spectrum. Stories about the lack of connection with the real world due to a phone are exponentially increasing by the day.

Just a few weeks ago in California, a photographer captured a man sitting on the edge of his sail boat thoroughly engaged with something on his phone. He never saw the humpback whale all of 5 feet in front of him breach the surface before diving back down into the water.

And it seems like every month there’s some video on national news about some girl walking into a fountain or some other immoveable object because they were so transfixed in their phones.

This trend of disengagement with one’s surrounding society is only growing, and it’s starting with children you wouldn’t think are being affected.

It comes down to any sort of stimulus that’s given as supplement to the bigger picture, i.e. giving a whining child a tablet with hours’ worth of mind-numbing games so the child can stay quiet during dinner. I understand that small toddlers can get rowdy and parents need to step in, but should we instinctively shove a screen in their face?

It then graduates to young teenagers, where some get the power of a cell phone at too early of an age. Take a walk around any mall and you’ll clearly see what I’m talking about.

The trend then arrives at the millennial generation, where some of the worst cases lie. What has surfaced in the last few years can be paralleled to any other addiction.

A recent survey by Baylor University showed that the average man uses his phone eight hours a day, while the average woman amounts to ten hours a day. And Time Magazine reported last year that one in four people check their phone every 30 minutes, and one in five every 10 minutes.

The statistics don’t lie. People are becoming exceedingly more and more controlled by their phones. Despite my criticism, I can’t say that I’m exempt from this grouping because I use my iPhone regularly throughout my day. However, there is certainly a tipping point.

Scientists have labeled it ‘nomophobia’, essentially the addiction to cell phones. At its root, the term stems from “no-mobile-phone-phobia.”

And just like any other addiction where one is exposed to some medium of dependency, the phone has become just that. Those same scientists have linked human impulsivity, anxiety, and materialism to this pocket-sized device.

Where can we find the origin for this inflamed issue? Some say that the “America’s commercialism is doing it” or “technology is the downfall of society” and everything in between. But it’s simpler than that. The biggest proponents of the cell phone addicts are the people themselves.

The people who abuse phone usage are the easiest scapegoats of the problem. After all, it’s easy to spot the ones who are walking into fountains.

But those phone users, young teenagers and millennials especially, can only take half the blame – the people who allow that societal disconnect are just as guilty as the youth. Yes, I’m talking about the parents.

How many times have you seen a parent with his or her son or daughter at a Phillies game or a school concert, while the child is paying more attention to their phone than they are the event they actually paid for? Sometimes we don’t even think twice about it, and why is that? Because it is becoming more and more of a common sight.

My parents have raised me to know that doing things such as having a conversation with the ones you love or learning something new are important, not beating your high score in flappy bird or trying to figure out what filter makes your Starbucks coffee appear even more appetizing. It’s not a matter of me saying that I was raised any better than the next person, because I’m certainly in no position to make that judgment, but I would never pass up the opportunity to talk to my grandparents in order to send a text to a friend who I’ll see the next day. The two just don’t have an equal value.

Parents need to realize that sitting back and allowing an entire generation to grow up with their eyes glued to a screen is not a good thing, and could very well prove to be detrimental to generations down the line.

In a world of instantaneous satisfaction and constant communication largely due to the cell phone, we need to take a second to look up from that screen and experience life. Talk to your family because some day, they’ll be gone. Take a hike in the woods or do something adventurous with your friends because I guarantee you liked them way before they started favoriting your tweets.

We can do better as a society. We don’t have to chain ourselves to our phones and subject ourselves to the lure of the notification buzz. Cell phones are a necessity in the lives we live today, but let’s keep them at a manageable level, and not in our hand every second of the day.

Go live life for what it has to offer. I guarantee it won’t sell you short.