Our class tried living three hours offline. And it didn’t go the way we expected.
When our Italian teacher suggested “a morning without phones,” we thought it was a joke.
Three hours without notifications, without scrolling, without chats. For many of us, a nightmare.
Instead, something strange happened: after the first ten minutes of panic, we started to really talk. Not through messages, not through reactions, but face to face.
We played an improvised writing game, taking turns inventing stories; even Luca—the one who never talks—read out loud a hilarious piece.
What struck me most was the feeling of “time stretching.”
Not chasing the screen made us notice details we usually ignore: classmates’ jokes, the sounds of the classroom, even the rubbery smell of new pencils.
At the end of the three hours, when they gave our phones back, many of us left them on the desk for a while, as if we weren’t in such a hurry anymore.
Maybe nothing will change starting tomorrow, but at least we understood that sometimes disconnecting… really reconnects us.
