Huhm, what a simple, interesting, but deep topic. Well, welcome to my blog like always, for this prompt I will love to treat it the way I understood it. Talking of if smartphones never existed.
Based on how I'm interpreting it, I feel there's absolutely nothing and no reason to be happier or safer because there's no smartphone, reason being that it never existed. At least, that was what the prompt says, "never existed." It just means there was never anything like a smartphone, it ber existed, it was never created and nobody ever knows it.
So, for that reason I believe nothing special or out of the ordinary will happen. Humans will keep on living their lives the way they used to, life will go on normally, we will find our usual (old) ways to communicate and reach out to each other, and we will live happily since the idea of a smartphones never even exist.
But then, we can't deny the huge help and advantage of having and owning one. Most of us in this generation have found smartphones as a means of surviving as it comes in handy a lot. If not for technology, gadgets and smartphones I'm sure I won't be here doing this now. Owning a smartphone can help us reach people who are miles away, it can help us learn work online, do remote jobs, take pictures, and all. So, I'm glad a smartphone exists, but if it never does, I know nobody will mind since we don't even know about it, and what I don't know cannot have that effect on me.
But then, human connections in this our age is nothing to write home about, and I feel the blame isn't really on smartphones, but on us. We've gotten so lazy and do almost every single thing online. Though smartphones brings us together, even those who are far away can now be best of friends, but then we have allowed it to make physical connections weak. That's how we can now see those who are very far to each other become best of friends, yet your next door neighbor is a total stranger to you. We've allowed our phones to disconnect us from people who are more closer to us, people that will be the first to rise up for us if there's ever a need for a physical intervention.
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Images are AI generated.
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