Daily Prompt – February 6, 2026

The most important invention in your lifetime is…

I am definitely going to say the cell phone. Now granted the very original cell phone the giant satellite phone looking thing that was bigger than a home phone was technically invented 6 years before I was born but no one considers that thing as a cell phone any more if they even remember it. Very few people had them because they were not only expensive but highly impractical.

I’m talking about the more modern iterations. Portable communication devices that helps us stay connected in all sorts of situations. Now I’m also going to caveat this. I think current cell phones are great but are over used often and disconnect us more than they connect us. My thoughts here are more focused on the importance of the original concept of the cell phone and the reason I consider it the most important invention in my lifetime stems from a very important story in my life.

When I was 16 I was driving home from my boyfriend’s house at probably 10pm. Not far from his house I was hit by a car coming off the highway that did not bother to follow the rules of merging on to a divided highway and cut straight across the median without stopping to check for traffic. I saw the potential to be hit and tried to get into the other lane to avoid him but my timing was off and he hit me as I was merging causing me to swerve wildly the other direction and hit a tree.

I was driving my mother’s car at the time and she had a car phone. If you’re old enough, you remember them. They were an early iteration of a cell phone or mobile phone but needed to be plugged into the cigarette lighter port to work. Yes back then they were still cigarette lighters not straight charge ports and definitely not USB. Well this presents a problem if you shouldn’t turn the car on because the front end is in a tree and steam and/or smoke is coming out. So I had no way to tell my mother what had happened or call the cops or anything. Fortunately, a classmate’s father saw me and not only called 911 but let me use his phone to call my mother. He had what we would today call a cell phone. Fully portable not requiring to be plugged into to use, and easy to hold. I don’t remember it well but if I had to guess it was one of the OG Nokias.

Ever since then, I don’t like being without a phone. I don’t like the people in my life to be without one. I have carried friends on my cellphone account just to ensure they have phones to use because being isolated in an emergency is a terrifying experience. An especially parents, I could never let a friend who is a parent be without a cellphone so that they could be reached in case of an emergency or reach out as well.

I don’t think our phones need all the supercomputer abilities they have now. But it has been interesting to watch them evolve over my lifetime. It will be interesting to continue to watch that evolution.