.png)
2 hours ago
2
Thursday.
Okay, Thursday. Time to get ready for the weekend.
Wait ready? For what, exactly?
You ever notice how we say things like that get ready for the weekend as if it’s a ritual? A small prayer we mumble to ourselves before the world chews us up again. But lately, I’ve been wondering if the weekend’s really something to look forward to or just another pause between notifications.
Because here’s the thing. There’s a problem. A big one. And it’s sitting right there in your pocket, glowing faintly like a radioactive stone. Your phone. My phone. The screens. The scroll. The slow, sweet poison of “just one more look.”
There’s a study, I wish I were making this up, called “Rising Cognitive Disability as a Public Health Concern Among US Adults.” Ten years of data. Ten years of watching the human mind quietly lose its footing.
The numbers are… well, “frightening” doesn’t quite cover it. From 2013 to 2023, the percentage of adults reporting serious trouble concentrating, remembering, or making decisions jumped from 5.3% to 7.4%. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Just a couple of percentage points. But that’s millions of people. Millions.
And here’s the real kick in the teeth: the biggest jump isn’t in the elderly. It’s in the young the 18 to 39 crowd. The ones who grew up online, who’ve never known silence, who sleep with their phones the way kids once slept with teddy bears. Their rate of cognitive disability almost doubled.
Maybe you feel it too. That fog. That creeping sense that your attention is leaking out of you, one scroll at a time. You open your phone to check one thing, and suddenly you’re thirty minutes older and no wiser. The light of the screen feels colder now, doesn’t it?
We need to talk about this. Not in the “public health crisis” kind of way though it is that but in the personal horror kind of way. The kind where you wake up one morning and realize you can’t hold a thought steady anymore.
So yeah. It’s Thursday. Time to get ready for the weekend.
But maybe, just maybe it’s also time to put the phone down.
Before the weekend’s the only thing we remember at all.
