Elizabeth Prempeh
Germany

As a clinician, I see the physical toll of our digital age long before patients realize why they are suffering. More and more cases of “tech neck syndrome” surface in daily practice—patients presenting with chronic neck, shoulder, or hand pain. Often, they report feeling perpetually exhausted despite having “done nothing” all day, unaware that constant scrolling has starved their brains of the restorative rest provided by the default mode network. There is an undeniable irony to these clinical encounters: as the patient sits in front of us, we clinicians are typing endlessly into screens for electronic health records while, quite hilariously, the patient is intermittently checking their own phone.

The price tag of modern civilization is the erosion of genuine human community. Sitting on a public bus recently, I looked at how screens have quietly colonized our public spaces. Half the passengers had their faces glued to glowing rectangles. Some held their necks at angles so severe I wondered if they were on the brink of structural damage. Hypnotized like sailors hearing a siren song, no one spoke to their neighbor.

Watching them, I caught myself drifting into a speculative daydream: What if the smartphone could become the most miraculous invention ever made?

In this imagined world, you wouldn’t merely tap a screen; you would synchronize your brain directly with it. No need to type or suffer repetitive strain injuries; the device reads your neural pathways. It monitors your blood glucose and orders meals enriched with omega-3 fatty acids. It regulates your limbic system—modulating the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus. When you become angry during a conversation, it silently releases GABA inhibitors to prevent overstimulation. When you date, two phones placed together perform a visual compatibility dance; if you aren’t compatible, the screens simply turn black. To enforce health, it locks you out until you exercise, using mild electric shocks to rouse you from lethargy.

In this universe, the phone even manages the default mode network—coaxing you to sit in terrifying silence, confronting your own anxiety and boredom so that your “boredom engine” can fire up fresh ideas.

A gentle tap on my shoulder snapped me back to reality. A stranger was handing me my phone, which was about to slip from my fingers as I zoned out on the bus.

I looked back down at the device in my hand. My daydream was surreal, yet Silicon Valley engineers are actively attempting to build versions of that exact “seamless” future. But at what cost?

Boredom is systematically stripped away and replaced by algorithmic feeds. Genuine conversations are replaced by asynchronous text messages. We navigate our days by digital calendars, gradually losing the tactile interconnection that once held communities together.

I grew up listening to traditional folklore like the Kwaku Anansi stories, sitting together by the fireside under a night sky. Today, I watched children sit in silence, holding tablets playing “Baby Shark” on a loop. The fireside has been replaced by the blue light of a screen.

As I travel between the Global South and the Global North, the pattern remains identical. Whether in a hospital ward, on public transit, or at a dining table, we are trading collective presence for digital solitude. If the gladiator battles of the ancient Colosseum were held today, half the fans would be watching the fight through a 6-inch display screen.

Technology will continue to control our habits, manage our health, and run our daily routines. But as physicians and as human beings, we are left facing an urgent question: How far can Silicon Valley engineers go to transform phones into neural managers—and how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for it?