Enslaved by the mobile phones

                                                                    Pic: Freepik

I went for a weekend lunch with my family to a nearby restaurant for a hearty meal. We placed our order and sat patiently waiting for the food to be served. I noticed a small boy, hardly five years old, accompanied by his father, sitting right opposite our table. Both sat silently. The father gazed around, pretty uninterestingly, sipping his Kombucha from a bottle, while the boy stared at the phone, held just an inch away from his face. What caught my eye was the content running on the phone screen, which seemed quite inappropriate for a five-year-old child. He did not seem to even blink his eyes and was glued to the screen. I suddenly felt a rush of anguish through my veins and exasperatedly whispered to my daughter, ‘I really feel sorry for this boy!” As the food was served to them, the boy ate with the phone in one hand while simultaneously scrolling through the phone screen. I am not sure if he knew what he was eating.

I was quickly reminded of the Matrix movie, which depicted human beings being enslaved by the machines and wondered how this movie, which was released in 1999, could predict our future so precisely. It made me wonder, are we not really enslaved by our smartphones today? The only thing that seems to calm the nerves of bored or noisy children in restaurants, theatres, or airports is their parents’ mobile phones. These are the handiest toys which parents give to their children indiscriminately just to save themselves from the trouble of putting in the effort to keep them engaged in a meaningful way.

As adults, too, we prefer to spend our time with our mobiles for hours together. It is a one-stop device for unlimited content and entertainment. Letting go of a phone to run an errand or complete a chore seems extremely uncomfortable. We choose to lie down on our couch and scroll mindlessly through an endless stream of reels and videos, over spending quality time with our family and friends. Our attention spans are short, our concentration and memory are poor, our sleep is disturbed, and our relationships are suffering. We are pretty aware of the ill effects of its excessive use, yet we have enough excuses to cling to it. It has made our lives miserable at so many levels, draining us of our energy, our physical and mental wellness, but we are not willing to let it go. Just a single notification sound on a phone is enough to alert us and jump towards it. We literally breathe with it, eat with it, and sleep with it! So yes, the machines have been pretty successful in enslaving us and our future generation.

Lucky are a few who have somehow managed to maintain their sanity and have mustered the courage to stay away from these addictive machines and be free of its vices.

As we finished our lunch, I saw the boy quietly leaving the restaurant with his father. He held the phone close to him as he walked sluggishly out of the door. I wondered if this was the quality time that the father had spent with his son. Would the boy ever remember this outing? Would he be able to recall the décor of the restaurant, the aroma of the food, the chatter of the diners? Or would he grow up spending many such outings entrapped in an app on a phone?