At exactly 5:59 pm on Wednesday, October 28, Ms. Barnes sent out an email warning everyone about inclement weather and potential power outages. I shrugged it off thinking it wouldn’t happen in my safe gated community.

Then at about five or six in the morning the next day, my eyes opened to find complete darkness. It had happened in my safe gated community.

Obviously, there are more serious issues going on in the world right now than a series of power outages that were most likely the result of a passing hurricane (think global pandemic) but to a seventeen-year-old girl who’s grown up with the internet and is currently enrolled in virtual school, it’s her worst nightmare.

That day, I woke up earlier than usual and looked outside at a brown street. The brown leaves covered the streets and there were branches everywhere. I even saw a couple of fallen trees as we drove around the neighborhood looking for a wireless signal.

We finally got a signal in the parking lot surrounding a couple of stores, and I can definitely say it felt liberating. We spent the majority of the day in the car, squinting our eyes to try and read off of our cell phones. I had a headache all day.

In between the frequent outings to acquire some means of internet, we’d return home to take a break and fuel up. Thankfully, we have a gas stove and were able to heat up basically anything (more power to those with electric stoves; I don’t know how you survived). Of course, you could just order food from somewhere or buy non-perishable foods, but my Covid conscious parents didn’t really want to try that, especially with the uncertainty of how the limited power would affect everything.

We found ourselves afraid of opening the refrigerator, so the food wouldn’t spoil and confused about whose plastic water bottle was whose since we couldn’t use our regular source of water from the refrigerator. And I can’t even remember how many times someone in our house flipped a light switch by habit only to be reminded by the darkness that there was no power.

However, the worst part of the whole experience was after seven, when the sun stopped shining and our house felt like a cave. It was pitch-black and the only sources of light came from our drained out phones and flashlights. All we did was sit in the darkness and make sad-looking shadows with our hands.

We were a mess.

Now I don’t say all of this to complain about our not-that-serious situation or whine about our lack of power for 15-plus hours. I want to share something I actually learned from this experience. Our generation has become weak. We lose our electricity and internet for a day (a couple of days for some) and chaos ensues. We’re deprived of our phones and we feel like the world is about to end. 

We have become so dependent on technology and certain luxuries like running water and electricity that it’s impossible to imagine life without them. So when tragedy strikes, we panic. Some of our ancestors never had cell phones or light switches or Google, but they got by just fine. So why can’t we get by for only a day or two?

Our lives are different from how people lived hundreds of years ago. We can find information on anything just by pressing a couple of buttons on a small screen. We can light up a room by flipping a switch. We can even go to school online (with some sort of success). But are we really better off with all of these advancements and newfound powers that people didn’t have hundreds of years ago? In some ways, yes. Life is much more efficient now. On the other hand, we’ve become lazier and get confused when things go wrong. Some of us don’t know how to live without our many technological powers and we become powerless without them.

Our phones can’t help us when there’s no internet and Google definitely won’t have the answer. So we’ll have to make do sitting in the dark with our sad shadow puppets, waiting for the power to come back to our homes and ourselves.