Are we turning into the humans in Wall-E?
A Reflection on Digital Overload
Have you seen the 2008 movie Wall-E? It is about human life in the future, somewhere in the 2100s. Planet Earth is destroyed—a piece of land filled with junk, and its atmosphere incapable of sustaining life forms. Surviving humans seem to have settled somewhere in a space cruise ship, awaiting Earth’s environment to return to normalcy. They sit on motorized chairs, glued to screens, seemingly oblivious to anything around them. Ironically, in the movie, the robots are more excited to see a life form grown back on Earth than the humans are.
I watched this movie in college and found it incredible. Yet, every year, I question if we are not indeed heading towards that life. Just look around you in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, an airport, a cafeteria, or even the next car at a signal. More often than not, people are lost in a screen.
This is what a typical workday looks like for me:
Wake up and immediately check my phone—WhatsApp, news, emails.
Carry it with me from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen. (Yes, gross. But let’s be honest, we’ve all done it.)
Start the morning routine, picking up my phone every five minutes, sometimes intentionally, sometimes out of habit.
Commute to work while calling my parents.
Spend six to eight hours staring at a computer screen.
Head home while listening to a podcast or YouTube video.
Take the kids to classes while scrolling through emails, social media, or random websites.
End the night with even more screen time—either for work or mindless scrolling.
Sleep.
For immigrants or anyone living far from where they grew up, the digital world isn’t just a distraction—it’s a necessity. Our families and friends are in different time zones, making constant phone-checking unavoidable. If you have aging parents living alone, the urge to stay connected is even stronger. I remember a stage of life when we would have the phone close by, especially at nights, dreading every time the phone rang, worrying that one our aged parents had taken ill.
It is hard when every single close friend or family member lives in a completely different time zone. If I don’t stay in touch digitally, I feel like I am missing a large part of what defines me.
And yet, this reliance on technology doesn’t come without its costs.
When my kids ask me, “Mom, how come you are on the phone all the time?” I struggle to explain to that I am not entertaining myself, rather I’m—
Working by sending an email or messaging on Teams to a colleague
Checking their class schedule or texting for pick up/drop off with another parent.
Looking up a recipe
Using a fitness app
Shopping or paying bills
Checking secretly how to solve mixed fractions so I can pretend I understand 4th-grade math
Reading a book, article, news, or email
Making a to-do list
Catching up with family and friends on WhatsApp
And yes, sometimes mindlessly scrolling because I can’t even remember why I picked the phone
Sometimes I catch myself with an inexplicable mood change which when I connect the dots back, I find the origin to—a random piece of discomforting news or a forward about how a family met with a tragic accident etc., a perceived snub in some social group where no one has responded to my message, realization upon reading an email that I have a big excursion awaiting me at work the next morning, or just this feeling of not being productive enough watching a video from an overzealous doctor who makes YouTube videos part-time. How in the world do they have the time?
And the energy zap. I feel like an absolute zombie sometimes. Irritable and scatterbrained. The irony is that even my mindfulness app is on my mobile phone, the very source of the problem.
What worries me is that I am a fairly well aware, educated woman. I read a lot about the downside of screen time. The dopamine hit these gadgets give you by feeding you with entertaining bits of information that keep you hooked for more. I have watched a bazillion videos on how to be focused, how to put away your phones, charge them in a different room, set up app time restrictions, etc. While, in theory, it all makes absolute sense and is so simple, it has not been easy. I am not on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, and my LinkedIn account may have a few cobwebs collecting on its page. And yet, I feel in some way deeply caught in a digital web of sorts.
I dread what our kids would do. As a parent struggling with boundaries, how am I supposed to provide guidelines to my kids when they get a mobile phone for the very first time?
I am spiraling a bit, and I realize that. But I also realize it is time for a more serious intervention. One of the premises of our phone addiction is that humans crave connection—we really want to understand and be understood. But digital connections, while important, can never replace the intimacy that face-to-face connections can provide. A younger colleague of mine, a few years after college, intentionally changed his field from design to manufacturing because he was so tired of having only online colleagues. “I really want to meet people at work”, he said during his interview.
Technology is changing faster than we can grapple with, and running away from it and living in a cave is not an option. Neither do I want to trivialize the enormity of having the power to hit a few clicks to get a job done. However, acknowledging the limitations of having powerful gadgets around us is the first step towards finding a solution.