The widespread adoption of smartphones has led to a significant "opportunity cost" for humanity, representing the loss of potential gains from alternative activities, which is often overlooked in debates about screen time's direct health impacts.
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In the summer of 2010,
my life changed forever.
At that time,
I was still in law school and I spent the summer break in the remote
tiny town of Insjön working as a legal intern
at the corporate headquarters of a retail chain.
It was the typical law student summer job.
It looks good on a resume, but it's kind of useless in practice.
I sat in on meetings. I didn't understand.
I wrote legal memos no one read.
And I drank way too much office coffee.
One weekend, as I sat alone in the DDR-chic apartment,
the company put me up in, my cell phone buzzed.
A package I had been waiting for had finally arrived.
So I ran to the post office.
I showed my I.D. I carried the package home.
I tore it open, and there it was,
my very first smartphone.
An HTC Desire.
I had no idea back then
and I don't think anyone did,
just how fundamentally the smartphone
would come to change our lives.
And in this video essay, I want to talk about that.
And I want to focus on a massive
but often overlooked cost
that the smartphone has imposed
on humanity.
On a Tuesday the 9th of January 2007
Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, went up on stage
to announce the launch of its smartphone.
Every once in a while,
a revolutionary product comes along
that changes everything.
I am no Steve Jobs fanboy,
but I will admit that Steve was prophetically correct about this.
Since 2007, in less than 20 years, the smartphone has taken over the world
faster than almost any other technology in human history.
Most technologies we take for granted today
didn't become mainstream overnight.
As you can see in this graph of technology adoption in the US,
running water, electricity,
flush toilets, washing machines, vacuum cleaners,
the old took decades to become widespread.
The smartphone, however,
it reached near universal adoption
at a remarkable speed.
Today, 4.3 billion people,
or 53% of the world's population, own a smartphone.
And in the US, 91% own a smartphone.
At the same time as these smartphones spread over the world,
the best engineers of our generation packed their bags
and moved to Silicon Valley with one mission:
to get people to spend as much time as possible
looking at these new smartphones.
And they succeeded with this beyond
their wildest dreams. Due to inventions such as the like button, push notifications,
algorithmic content feeds,
the infinite scroll and short form video content,
Humanity today spends a stunning
amount of time looking at phones.
In Germany, people spend an average of 3.35h per day
on their smartphones.
In the US, it's 4.34h.
In India, 4.77h.
And in Indonesia, people spend over
6 hours per day on their phones.
We spend so much time on our phones that many researchers today
are sounding the alarm about what
this screen time may be doing to us.
For example, this is Gloria Mark.
Her research has shown that our attention
spans are diminishing dramatically.
In 2003, her test subjects
were able to spend an average of
150 seconds on any given task before they were distracted.
In 2012, it was 75 seconds,
and in 2016, 47 seconds.
And this is Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge.
In books like The Anxious Generation and iGen,
they make a quite compelling case that all of this screen time
is more or less messing up the younger generation.
It's telling that last year the word brain rot was named
the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the year,
a word that means.
Brain Rot: The supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state,
especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material
(now, particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.
However,
the research into the negative effects
of smartphones and social media
is not uncontroversial.
For example, researchers like Andrew Przyblzki
and Amy Orben, point to studies suggesting that the connection between screen
time and mental health issues probably is overstated
in the public discourse.
This debate, whether all of the time we spend on our phones
is incurring a cost on our health,
will probably not be resolved any time soon.
But, and here comes the point I want to make in this essay,
this debate probably distracts from the fact
that even if screen time doesn't cause a heath cost,
it is definitely, already, indisputably,
incurring a massive opportunity cost.
This is Friedrich von Wieser.
In 1911, he coined the term opportunity cost.
Opportunity cost, which is one of the first concepts
you learn if you study economics,
is defined as:
Opportunity Cost: The loss of potential gain from other alternatives
when one alternative is chosen.
As an example, if you spend one hour in your chair
looking at your phone, the opportunity cost is the value
of the best alternative thing you could have done during that time instead.
And, depending what you value most, that could mean:
60 min meeting a friend, 60 min reading a book,
or 60 min baking sourdough bread, whatever floats your boat.
And this is important:
The more we use our phones, the higher
the opportunity cost gets because the value we get
from spending time on our phones may be positive at first,
but the value decreases dramatically
the more we do it, which also means that the opportunity cost rises,
the more time we spend on our phones.
And if we're spending 3 to 6 hours daily,
the opportunity cost gets enormous.
And now imagine scaling this up to the billions of people
around the world are glued to their screens.
The combined opportunity cost of smartphones on humanity
is almost impossible to comprehend.
I came to understand
the massive opportunity cost of screen time
on a personal level seven years ago when
I hit rock bottom.
In 2018, I was living abroad in Washington DC for work,
something I had dreamt about doing ever since I was a kid.
But after two months of being there, I realized something was wrong.
Instead of exploring cafes, museums, and finding new friends,
I had spent nearly all my free time there
doomscrolling on my phone or chatting with friends from home.
One day, when I felt particularly miserable scrolling my phone,
it also hit me that ever since that summer in Insjön,
when I got my first smartphone, I had barely read a single book outside school.
Reading had once been so important in my life,
now I could barely do it anymore.
I realized: Something. Needed. To change.
So what did I do?
I threw my phone under the bed.
I walked out the door, went to a store, bought an e-reader, downloaded
a few books, and headed to a hipster cafe by DuPont Circle.
And after eight years of barely reading, I started reading again.
And this changed my life.
I read Yuval Harari’s bestseller “Sapiens”,
and it completely blew my mind open to new ways of thinking.
I read The School of Life’s book “A Job to Love”, and it gave me tools
to figure out what I want to spend my life doing.
And I later read David Epstein's “Range”,
and I realized that it's never too late
to learn new things and change your life.
I still fall back to excessive screen use, quite often actually,
but I'm pretty confident that
if I hadn't sort of hit rock bottom when I was in Washington DC,
I probably wouldn't have broken my screen addiction, at least temporarily
and in turn I wouldn't have gone back to reading,
and in turn I wouldn't have dared to leave my corporate law career.
And in turn, I would never have started making
video essays like this one.
Given the life changing effects
I experienced from breaking my screen addiction,
and given that I still fall back to excessive
screen use way too often,
I have been asking myself:
Can we do something to make it easier for people
to put down their phones?
Do we need some type of regulation?
Or is this just something we all need to solve on our own?
Is there, perhaps, a third layer to this issue?
This is Tristan Harris, famous from The Social Dilemma.
Tristan blames our excessive screen time on the addictive
and exploitative methods that the tech companies use.
And he wants us to regulate those methods.
In other words, to Tristan, excessive screen time
is a Technology and Regulation Problem.
And this is Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable.
He argues that it's up to us as individuals
to take control of how we use our time.
In other words, to him, excessive screen
time is a personal responsibility problem.
So who is right?
Is excessive screen time a technology and regulation problem?
Or is it a personal responsibility problem?
Well, I believe it's both.
But I also believe that there's a third layer
to this issue that is often overlooked.
Excessive screen time is also:
A Problem of Societal Norms.
The societal norm today looks like this.
Almost wherever we are
the societal norms says that it's not only fine,
but it's actually expected that we pick up our phones.
But the thing with societal norms is that they can
and they do change.
And this famous ad from 1949,
a doctor recommend s camel cigarets.
Back then, it was perfectly normal for nurses
and doctors to smoke even at work.
But over time, societal norms shifted and it became inappropriate
for doctors to smoke at work.
And it wasn't until after the norms already had shifted that it became illegal.
Or consider racist, sexist and homophobic jokes.
There are clear indications that such jokes have become much less
common also in private settings, not because jokes like this
have become illegal, but because societal norms have shifted.
So what if we can
shift our norms when it comes to screens as well?
Just like we shifted our norms about
smoking and sexist jokes.
And if so, how can we help
get that change started?
Well, as George Washington wrote in 1780
Example, whether it be good or bad, has a powerful influence.
Today, social science research bears out that so-called
behavioral contagion
profoundly affects what we do.
Whether you will start smoking or not depends largely on
how many of your friends are smoking.
And how much alcohol you drink, depends largely on how much your friends drink.
Whether you as a house owner will install solar panels or not depends
largely on how many solar panels you see on roofs around you.
So I think it's a quite reasonable hypothesis
that if you will be glued to your phone or not depends mostly
on whether other people around you are glued to their phones.
I've also noticed very clearly in my own behavior
that if I'm on a train, for example,
where I see people reading books, I am way more likely
to also put my phone away and take out my book.
So if we want to change societal norms,
maybe we can be guided by the author Brian Klaas idea that
we control nothing,
but we influence everything.
I’m Andres Acevedo and this is The Market Exit.
So over the past six months, my channel has grown a lot
and people keep telling me that I need to boost this growth
by breaking up my video essays into short form
content for platforms like
YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and Tik Tok.
And from a business standpoint, this makes sense.
And I even considered doing this.
But then I realized that I don't watch short form content
because it messes up my dopamine levels
and it makes me miserable.
So is it then ethical
for me to flood the market with it?
Well, probably not.
So I've decided to keep focusing mainly on long form content,
which also means that I depend
entirely on your support
of my long form videos.
And the simplest way to support me
is to, like, subscribe and to share my videos.
And if you really like what I do,
I invite you to
patreon.com/themarketexit
any amount helps and, to my existing patrons,
Thank you very, very much.
So I normally make all of the motion
graphics for my videos myself,
but for this video I had the privilege of working with Karla Núñez,
a brilliant motion designer who made the two beautiful collage
animation scenes for this video essay.
Please check out more of her amazing stuff and follow her on
@kfxanimation on Instagram.
Also, a big thanks to my sister Anna Clara for operating
the camera for the walk-and-talks in this video.
All right. That was it for this time.
Bye bye.
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