Can you imagine life – without mobile phone in 2025? We would still have been alive – with less stress, anxiety, anger, toxicity and perhaps — leading a more relaxed and peaceful life. Life would not have been a breeze after all but many of us would still be walking on the sea-shore rather than finding it on mobile – as we do now.
Opinions may differ but a gradual realization has set in to have necessary restrictions on the use of mobiles by the children, teenagers or adolescents. Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had in November, last year, vowed to ban children under 16 from social media, saying the pervasive influence of platforms like Facebook and TikTok was “doing real harm to our kids”.
“The tech giants would be held responsible for enforcing the age limit and face hefty fines if regulators notice young users slipping through the cracks”, Prime Minister Albanese said. Several countries are asking manufacturing companies to create built-in settings to prevent free access of children to the mobiles.
A generation, with its neck and back down and eyes glued uninterruptedly or for about 10-hours or more to the screen which is less than one feet in length, is into a dangerous mutation…?
The ubiquitous metal piece has become something like a second heartbeat to the Gen-X. The cheek by jowl living of the youth with their mobile phones is no more objected to by the parents. Instead, the round the clock checking or surfing of mobiles by the children is accepted as a ‘new normal.’ The world of mobiles and its social media, news and entertainment has hijacked the current generation from the actual world. The virtual world is the (real) one now for the young who are refusing to be rescued from it. It is a ‘great escape’ for them- a new smack, marijuana drug or sugar– giving them endless feeling of relief or say sedation.
The mobile telephony in India was launched on July 31, 1995, with West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu on July 31, 1959, making the first phone call using Nokia handset from Writer’s building in Kolkata to then Union Minister Sukhram at Sanchar Bhawan in Delhi. The total number of mobiles in the country has risen to 1.12 billion in 2025, matching 76 per cent of the population in the country. As the time rolled by, new faster network-spectrum- spread and the basic mobile phones were transformed to the Smart ones loaded with 24X7 news ,information or the disinformation, debates , ‘out of the box’ programmes, politics, porn or explicit shows or talks. The no-holds-barred barrage trolls added to the increased spice or intoxication.
Mobiles now have all the unfiltered excitement and the incitement from the world that may impress, depress, progress or regress the hormones in the human body and remote-control the behavior of the phone holder whose mind is shifting from one information to another in a split of a second.
The YouTube, Facebook WhatsApp, and the X have narrowed down the total universe to the mobile and made it available to children, young and old with a finger-tap on the screen. The Earth is switched off the second the screen is on and one is launched to where from a ‘return’ is possible only by a much stronger tap or shock from outside. People have fallen-down from a roof, stair case, cliff, balcony, sea rock, river side or has come under wheels of a speeding car, truck, train or even slipped deep into the manhole with their mobile on…
The heart-wrenching incidents around the world are galore but the level of addiction to smart-phones has gone deep in the recess of the users.
On April 24, popular social media influencer and a law graduate Misha Agrawal died by suicide, as her number of her followers dipped.
“My little baby sister had built her world around Instagram and her followers, with a single goal of reaching 1 million followers and gaining loving fans. When her followers started decreasing, she became distraught and felt worthless. Since April, she has been deeply depressed, often hugging me and crying, saying, Jijja, what will I do if my followers decrease? My career will be over,” she wrote in a post on Misha’s official Instagram account.
The full impact of ‘round the clock’ social media and its varied ‘avtars’ on the young brain is, yet to be, fully assessed but the visible signs of a ‘disturbed generation’ are out there in day-to-day life. The disoriented look, the hyper temperament, increasing isolation, short attention span, anger and a general self-centered Psyche are some of the obvious traits which tend to partly define the ‘mobile generation’.
A New York Times (NYT) report, this month, quotes a ‘Global Flourishing Study’, a collaboration between researchers at Harvard and Baylor University, saying “young people aren’t as happy as they used to be” and that “U shaped curve has started to flatten”.
The study which collected data from more than 2,00000 people in over 20 countries had found that, on average, young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 were struggling — not only with happiness, but also with their physical and mental health, their perceptions of their own character, finding meaning in life, the quality of their relationships and their financial security. The researchers combined these measures to determine the degree that each participant was living in a state where all aspects of life were good. Leader of the study, according to the NYT, says “it is a pretty stark picture”.
“Study after study shows that social connection is critical for happiness, and young people are spending less time with friends than they were a decade ago,” said Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast “, the newspaper reported.
Another professor felt that young people were in “trouble” and suspected that the “problem is largely tied to what they aren’t doing because they are busy looking at screens.”
Travel by any means -train, taxi, metro or bus- the offline interaction of people with each other is very rare. Once travelers are settled in their seats, mobiles takeover them. Like in metropolises, where neighbours of decades, mostly, do not know each-others’ name, the journeys too have also become ‘anonymous’. The plane journeys do separate the mobile and its user ‘apart’ in the air but the two ‘lovers’ merge into each other (or immersed !). Even as the plane is still taxing at the airport after the landing (listen to the lightning switch of ringtones!).
The mobiles have increased the anxieties of its users as they have become habitual of calling and messaging to their kith or kins or friends. A miss in the scheduled call or message from children makes parents nervous or the vice versa. In the absence of mobiles, Individuals of the last generation were aware that a call (from the fixed phone) would happen only when he or she reaches the destination. The minds were, then, not conditioned for the hourly reporting. The rapid flow of information on social media has now created a restlessness that demands more information to feel safe and secure.
With increasing ‘connect’, the man has become lonely with mobile phones and social media.
It is impacting the functioning of the brain. Think of a man 30 years ago making a call from his fixed phone at home (if at all he has one) reaching his office and making a call again back home and thereafter for hours together doing all but not looking at the smartphone away from hours of eye-straining screen-time and the mountains of brain-shifting information.
According to social psychologist and New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, teens who overuse social media and smartphones could deprive themselves of a life skill that’s essential for success.
Social media is “shattering” attention spans, he said: “These things are designed to interrupt you. Urgent that you restore your brain,” said Haidt, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and wrote the New York Times best-selling book, “The Anxious Generation.”
The smart move is to make improvements now: “If you [are on your phone up to 10 hours a day] until you’re 25, then the damage might be permanent,” he said. “By 25, the frontal cortex is kind of done changing. … At that point, it’s going to be much harder to get your attention back.”
Teens who overuse social media and smartphones could deprive themselves of a life skill that’s essential for success, according to social psychologist Haidt.
How does a man who used to talk, smile, laugh, interact, interject, and mingle and mix without much prompting has suddenly turned into a disoriented robot..? Smart phones have contributed to the further alienation of urban society. The brain is not a dustbin. The handset is pouring out millions of contradictory and complex views and voices, pasting innumerable images and imaginary, each second, has made the man lonelier, confused and almost brought him to his wits end. It has curtailed, if not dented, its capacity to think independently. The human brain is simply not meant to fine process the endless mix of ‘social media’: including the witty-vicious trolls without borders.
But hands off to mobiles is a distant dream as they have safely embedded themselves in the young minds. It will, probably, take another decade or so to collate data as to how much the mobiles have muted human thinking. One thing is clear – they have increased the generation gap by years and replaced the chirp of the birds with the ring tones. A part of the solution is: try reclaiming yourself from the conditioning set by the mobiles. Walk-out and be with ‘Nature’.
A very well written piece on the adverse impact of mobiles and social media, which has led to the emergence of a disturbed generation. Mobiles, once a boon, have indeed become a bane taking the present gen to its nadir. The gen next has degenerated into gen text. Indeed, it’s a must read article if we are serious about finding solutions to the mess the mobiles have created for us.
Your exposition on the repercussions of habitual cellphone use is both thorough and eloquent. The delineation of mobile addiction’s manifold drawbacks, and its detrimental impact on diminishing our quality of life, is articulated with commendable precision .