The ugly cost of smartphones

I’m Andres Acevedo, and this is The Market Exit. In this essay, I talk about one of the biggest, yet often overlooked, costs of the smartphone era: opportunity cost.

We all know that screen time has reshaped our lives—but what are we giving up in the process? Instead of focusing on the controversial debate around whether phones are harming our mental health, I explore what we already know to be true: that the more time we spend on our screens, the less time we have for everything else.

We’ll look at how smartphones took over the world at an unprecedented speed, how Silicon Valley designed them to be as addictive as possible, and why the real cost of excessive screen time isn’t just distraction—it’s everything we could have done instead. I also reflect on my own experience of hitting rock bottom with screen addiction, how I broke free (at least for a while), and what we can do collectively to shift our relationship with screens.

📺 Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:26 Chapter 1 – How the smartphone took over the world
05:15 Chapter 2 – Opportunity cost: What screen time has replaced
08:53 Chapter 3 – Behavioral contagion
12:05 Conclusion

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#screentime #smartphones #themarketexit