In a revelation that will surprise precisely no one who has ever attempted to make eye contact with a teenager or navigate a pavement in Zone 1, a London therapist has confirmed what we all suspected: we are now a species that communicates primarily through glass rectangles. The esteemed quack, Dr. Miranda Sallow (who charges £200 an hour to watch people ignore their notifications), reports that her patients are averaging a staggering 14 hours per day of screen time.
That is 14 hours. Which, if my maths is correct, leaves approximately 10 hours for blinking, eating, and pretending to listen to your spouse. UK health officials, in a move that suggests they have just discovered the internet, are now calling for a mandatory digital curfew.
One imagines this will be about as effective as asking a toddler to kindly stop shoving peas up their nose. The proposed curfew, likely modelled on the sort of draconian measures reserved for teenagers in boarding schools, would apparently involve turning off phones at a certain hour. Yes, turning them off.
As if that is something anyone born after 1990 knows how to do. I suspect the average Instagram addict would rather gnaw off their own thumb than face the existential dread of a phone-free evening. The therapist, speaking from her Harley Street dungeon of despair, described patients who wake up and immediately check their phones before urinating.
She called this 'morning ritual dysfunction'. I call it modern life. She also noted a rise in 'phantom vibration syndrome' where people believe their phone is buzzing when it is not.
This is not a syndrome. This is a cry for help. The government, meanwhile, is considering the digital equivalent of a bedtime story: a nationwide switch-off between midnight and 6am.
Because nothing says 'I respect your autonomy' like the state turning off your primary source of dopamine. But let us be realistic. The only thing that will cure this epidemic is a global EMP or a sudden shortage of cat videos.
Until then, I shall be in the pub. Where the gin is strong and the phones don't work. This is Biff Thistlethwaite, filing from the brink of digital oblivion.
Goodnight, and may your notifications be few.
