Brains: they just don’t make ‘em like they used to. Two and a half centuries ago, the Enlightenment took Europe by storm; the salons of 18th-century France were the stomping ground of some of the greatest theoretical minds in history. John-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume and Voltaire were just a few of the famous philosophes who gathered at these soirees to discuss and debate religion, government and metaphysics. Cornell frat parties seem slightly pedestrian in comparison. If the Enlightenment was the start of modern thought, the Wireless Age has been the end of it.

We live in a time when we can be constantly connected to those we know. Cell phones, only a few years ago considered an indulgence, are now ubiquitous on any college campus. Essentially every Cornell student has an Internet connection in his room, and many of us leave ourselves constantly logged on to AIM, displaying a parade of away messages declaring our exact locations and precisely when we’ll be back.

It is possible, if we so desire, to never really be alone; we can always have the comforting presence of familiar screennames lined up alongside our paper-in-progress, or the knowledge that we have only to press a few silver buttons on our phone to be instantly gabbing with any of our friends.

This omnipresent connection to friends and family is, without a doubt, useful. It allows us to keep in contact with loved ones, to save invaluable college-student time by conversing with people while doing homework or walking from class to class. If we have plans to meet someone but we’re running late, we can give them a call to let them know instead of leaving them to wonder if we’re going to show at all. If there’s an emergency of some sort, we can always be immediately contacted. There are countless conveniences that technology places in our pockets — but these conveniences come at a cost, and not just in the form of a monthly charge.

How would the world be different today if, when Rene Descartes isolated himself for a week in the mid-1600s to write his Meditations on First Philosophy, he had been continually interrupted by his cell phone playing “Bootylicious”? We’d be perpetually quoting, “I think, therefore I am ready for this jelly.” If the Internet had existed 400 years ago, would we even have physics or calculus? I imagine the following IM conversation between John Locke and Isaac Newton:

tabularasa1632: hey whats up
applehead981: nm just trying to figure out this stupid 3rd law of motion
applehead981: physics is hard
tabularasa1632: lol
tabularasa1632: ya thats why i stick to govt
tabularasa1632: no numbers
applehead981: what are u doing
tabularasa1632: eh just tryin to decide the natural rights of man
applehead981: ic
applehead981: wanna play starcraft
tabularasa1632: k
applehead981: kewl

Modern technology may allow us to be in constant conversation with loved ones, but it also provides us with endless distractions, thereby relieving us of the privilege of being alone with our own thoughts. Before the telephone was invented, it could take days to contact anyone who didn’t live in your town; the only form of instant communication was sitting down in the same room as someone else and talking to them face to face. Aside from reading and visiting people, there wasn’t much to do with one’s free time except think.

Now, in an era of sound-bytes, we are constantly bombarded with noise and psychological clutter. The only time we have to ourselves — the silent hour when our roommate isn’t home and we don’t quite feel like doing work, the ten-minute walk from Warren Hall to Lincoln — is spent immersed in simultaneous inconsequential prattle with multiple people. We no longer have meaningful conversations with the people we know, but, more importantly, we’ve become completely oblivious to the world around us and the thoughts inside our heads.

It’s too easy to shut out the world by chatting idly with a friend as you walk from class to class. It’s too easy to waste an hour reading the archives of Fashion Police on E!online while carrying on stilted IM conversations with five different people about last night’s episode of Friends. Our constant social connection may be convenient, but that sense of panicked listlessness we feel when our internet service is down or our cell phones have no reception indicates that we’re getting slightly more than we bargained for.

The reason there are no Rousseaus or Descartes’ or salons today is not that we’re getting stupider; we just don’t need to think anymore. Moreover, we loathe the idea of just sitting around and thinking, and choose instead to fill our downtime with the most superficial of human interactions. Cell phones and the Internet have raised us as a generation of people who can’t stand to be alone with our own thoughts for more than five minutes — and we are the ones who suffer. We have become our own overworked fathers, too busy with the lives of other people to contemplate what is going on in our own. When our superficial connections are broken we feel achingly alone, not quite sure what to do with ourselves; we fear loneliness because we fear being left to conduct awkward small-talk with the strangers we’ve become.

Our thoughts lie tangled up in an inchoate mess, and we are too overwhelmed to extricate them. It’s a cruel cycle: the less self-aware we are the less comfortable we feel being alone with ourselves, and the less comfortable we feel being alone with ourselves the more we escape by calling up a friend or idly surfing the web. We need to break the cycle. We need to turn off our cell phones, log off of AIM, and have a conversation with the one person we’ve been snubbing this entire time: ourselves.