Our phones are colonizing our minds

I don’t have TikTok. But in a way, I’m as addicted to the app as everyone else I know.

When I was a child, my mom brought me on her weekend trips to the bank. I looked forward to the visits, because I used the distance between my head and the countertop to gauge the success of my growth spurts. Once I tired of that, I imitated the mechanical whirling of the cash counter as it sorted ones from fives, or guessed the flavor of the lollipops beside the front desk. On rare occasions, Mom allowed us to play Brick Breaker on her BlackBerry. This was something of a treat.

Mind you, this was 2012. We’d finally moved past the multi-tap text system that required typing 5-5-5 for an ‘L,’ but electronic keyboards were experimental. The iPod and iPhone 3G were infants learning to take their first steps. So I liked Brick Breaker, not because watching a ball run into pixeled bricks was particularly fascinating, but because phones were a novelty.

I miss the days when screen time felt like a luxury.

As the first generation to grow up with smartphones, technology was a central theme of most Gen Z childhoods. Many of my peers had iPads or iPhones, but few of us considered them our go-to means of entertainment. I never played Clash or Clans or Geometry Dash for more than an hour—maybe two—at a time. Books and coloring sheets were my mainstay. Even when I got my first smartphone, an iPhone 6, entertainment wasn’t my primary motive; rather, texting allowed me to communicate my whereabouts to my parents after long commutes to and from school.

Today, rapid innovation has transformed technology from a tool to a lifestyle. Owned by 91% of Americans, up from 35% in 2011, smartphones are normalized. It’s tempting to celebrate this as accessibility—and indeed, ownership is high even below the poverty line, at 76% among U.S. adults with an income of $30k or less. But I wonder, what is the price?

We no longer text just to tell our parents we are okay; we live our social lives through grey and blue bubbles. We don’t limit our screen time to an hour to decompress; we rely on social media and streaming as entertainment. And rather than thriving in boredom, we fear it, procrastinating it away with highlights and TikToks.

Technology has colonized our minds. Our boredom has been occupied, our curiosity conscripted. Our attention is territory, measured in clicks instead of acres, and technology is trampling across it.

Tech is not just invading our minds, it is reshaping them.

Platforms influence how we speak, think, and joke. Emojis replace emotion, and memes substitute in for wit. Smartphones paved neural roads through our brains—and they control the traffic.

On Sunday, I checked my weekly Screen Time report for the first time in months. Have you ever had someone tell you that your friend has an annoying laugh, and all of a sudden, you can’t unhear it? The experience was a bit like that. According to my report, I spend an average of 18 hours per week texting; that’s two-thirds of a day, gone, staring at dual-colored bubbles.

What scares me most is how unaware I was of my own habits. When I got my first phone, I used it a few minutes each day. I rarely took it with me when leaving the house. I capped my number of active text threads at five, clearing out my messages each week, and I didn’t have social media.

Now, what was once an optional accessory is a constant side piece. My box of brain rot accompanies me from dawn to dusk, and sometimes the hours in-between—in hand or in pocket, and even, shameful as it is to admit, into my bathroom and bed. When it is not buzzing, pinging, or ringing, the sounds echo in my mind. I know they aren’t real, but I tap my screen in paranoia nonetheless. The other day, the urge to doom-scroll was so strong, I buried my phone in my dresser and barricaded it with furniture, all to prevent myself from looking at it.

It isn’t just me. Smartphone addiction is an epidemic. 79% of Gen Zers have their phone on them at all times, and 91% keep it within arm’s reach while sleeping. Teens spend an average of five hours a day on social media, and one-fourth of adults in a recent study were found to be addicted to TikTok.

Our collective reliance to our phones has made them a surrogate for some of the most important things in our life: socialization, entertainment, education. The majority of students I know spend lectures texting, shopping, gaming, or multitasking on another assignment. I rarely have a conversation that’s not interrupted by the ping of a notification.

Screens wire our brains to expect low-risk, instant gratification as the norm. Why talk to a stranger in the dentist waiting room when we can scroll TikTok? Why pay attention to a 90-minute class when ChatGPT can summarize the transcript of the lecture recording? We would prefer frictionless distraction over fleeting discomfort—but in doing so, we’ve turned smartphones, streaming, and social media into things we cannot live without.

Our minds are assimilating.

It isn’t totally our fault. Like any colony, we provide raw materials—our time, behaviors, and data—and in return, we’re fed content designed to pacify us.

It’s hard to ignore that convenience and curation when such high volumes of short-form content are being shoved down our throats. We can’t listen to music without falling down a rabbit hole of reels about the hottest artist on Spotify. Netflix has a new, addicting mobile layout. And most of us have defaulted to accepting Google Gemini’s three-sentence summaries as sufficient, because God forbid we have to scroll through a 2-page article to learn more.

Some days, I worry my period app is going to release year-in-review shorts for me. Congrats, Kaila! In 2025, your cycle was mostly regular, and you were pregnant zero times!

Is this how we want to experience the world—in snapshots and ten-second soundbites?

We’re becoming a society that counts friends using followers, fills downtime with doom scrolling, and values reels over real thoughts. Newspapers are dying. So is primetime TV. In their place, we have social media echo chambers and endless streaming set to auto-play.

With generative AI, we don’t even need to think anymore. I’ve watched friends read answers verbatim from ChatGPT to win a few extra participation points. In my class projects, there’s always a teammate who submits a “contribution” copied from ChatGPT—and it’s always half-baked, underdone, and incorrect. Once, while brainstorming ideas for a business pitch, a girl began every sentence with, “Well, Chat says,” as if that were a substitute for having an opinion of her own.

We can’t force other people to think critically. But it scares me that so many of us are content not to. We are complacent here, working in a digital factory we think we own.

It’s time to overcome our smartphone addiction and reclaim our mental territory.

By the time we realize the extent to which technology has invaded our lives, the war will already be lost.

A common argument I hear is, if the technology exists, why not use it? To this, I say, are a hammer and nails always the right tools to hang a photo upon a wall? No—sometimes a Command Strip or wall tape is better. If we limit ourselves to the same set of tools, we will never know whether other options could have led to a stronger outcome. And while hardware doesn’t have an expiration date, our brains decline with nonuse.

Once upon a time, I could curl up on the couch and read a book cover-to-cover, no breaks to eat, use the restroom, or even rest my eyes. Now I am a doom-scroller who craves the dopamine released by each swipe right, and judges the health of my social life by the amount of notifications I receive.

Our minds are not free-range anymore. They are fenced-in, harvested, repackaged, and resold to us in 15-second clips.

We didn’t choose this, didn’t wake up one day and decide to build our lives around a glass rectangle. It happened slowly and imperceptibly, sand fated to fill the hourglass. But the time to reverse its impacts is running short.

If we can be conditioned into this, we can be conditioned out.

We can begin by reclaiming the parts of ourselves we’ve outsourced to machines: our boredom, our curiosity, our conversations. We can measure our day not in screen time but in page turns, deep talks, awkward silences, and actual laughter. We can let our brains be messy and nonlinear and alive again.

We don’t need to delete every app or become digital hermits. Change starts small: leave your phone in another room during meals. Try a no-scroll morning routine. Track your screen time—and set a limit that actually feels human. Read a book without a soundtrack. Journal instead of texting when you're overwhelmed. Reintroduce yourself to silence. Be present.

Technology is not evil. But it is greedy. It will take as much of us as we are willing to give. So the question isn’t whether we’re addicted; it’s, “What are we willing to do to reclaim our lives?”

It’s time to revolt. I, for one, am ready to fight back. What about you?

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