In late 2010, when the iPad was only months old and would eventually sell hundreds of millions, a New York Times reporter asked Steve Jobs if his children enjoyed using it. “They haven’t used it,” said Jobs.

“We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” He who had given the world’s most coveted screen to numerous hands was rationing it at his family’s dinner table.

Throughout much of human history until very recently, being overweight was a status symbol in many cultures. Looking through galleries of pictures of merchants and monarchs, large jawlines and obesity were among the main features. Being obese indicated that you could afford to purchase and consume large quantities of food, and that you didn’t need to utilise your body for physical labour.

With inexpensive food available to everyone, sedentary lifestyles are increasing; therefore, fewer individuals need to work physically, and the symbolism has changed. As of 2011-2014, U.S. Federal Health Survey data showed that in lower-income groups, 45% of women were obese, whereas only 30% of those in higher-income groups were obese. Similarly, among adults with less than a high school education, obesity levels were at 40%, while those with college degrees (university) were at 28%. Therefore, obesity switched from being a status indicator for wealth to being a signifier for those who were left behind socio-economically.

He was not alone among his peers. Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired and no stranger to technology himself, told the New York Times in 2014 that he and his wife enforced strict screen limits at home, adding that they had seen up close the dangers of technology and didn’t want it happening to their own kids. The people at the top were the ones not doing/saying this publicly who produced.

This isn’t solely an issue within America. Data from a 2019 study published in PLOS Medicine analysed household-level data from over 100 countries to track their economic progress. They also demonstrated how the previously mentioned reversal in the relationship between obesity prevalence and socioeconomic status occurs. Once a nation reaches a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) level of approximately $8,000 per capita, obesity is no longer primarily prevalent among the richest households in the nation. On average, once nations reach a GDP of approximately $25,000 per capita, the poorest households will be more likely to be obese than the wealthiest. According to the researchers, they anticipate that by 2040, approximately 70% of the world’s nations will either begin to experience this reversal or complete it.

Although Bangladesh remains on the older side of that curve, it is quickly catching up. Studies utilising the Demographic and Health Surveys have consistently shown that wealthy Bangladeshis are significantly more likely to be obese than poor ones. Also, studies have shown that childhood obesity tends to cluster in the wealthiest families.

There is an underlying principle that makes sense, and it is relevant to many areas beyond food. When something becomes relatively inexpensive and accessible or consumable, consuming excessive amounts no longer signifies status; rather, it signifies a lack thereof.

This exact reversal is now taking place regarding screens. Almost no one has noticed because, for about two decades, access to the internet was an exclusive skill. Both internet access and devices were mostly reserved for well-off citizens, those who could afford them. Displays/screens were where the money was.

Fast forward to today, and screens and the internet have become easily accessible, triggering the aforementioned rule again. There is already evidence of how much time Americans spend looking at screens through the numbers. According to Nielsen’s 2019 report, adults spend an average of 11 hours and 27 minutes per day engaged with media, whether on television, radio, phones or computers, which equates to nearly half of every day and most of our daily lives.

The screen uses an income-based gradient that we recognise from the dinner plate. In 2021, Common Sense Media conducted a census of American children and found that children aged 8 to 12 in families earning less than $35,000 annually spent approximately 7.5 hours a day on entertainment screens. In contrast, those in families making more than $100,000 spent four hours and 21 minutes viewing entertainment screens. Children aged thirteen to eighteen spent nine hours nineteen minutes on entertainment screens, versus seven hours sixteen minutes. So those in the lower economic quartile are consuming it more.

Who is limiting access to these devices? As early as 2011, the New York Times wrote about the Waldorf School of the Peninsula (a private school located in the centre of Silicon Valley) whose students’ parents work for companies such as Google, Apple, Yahoo! and Hewlett-Packard, and do not allow students to have screens in the classroom at all. In 2018, the New York Times also explained how many wealthy tech elites are creating schools that use a model of wooden toys and human interaction, while poor children attending public schools are issued laptops or educational apps because they are cheaper than hiring teachers.

The part where we need to focus and be concerned about is that becoming obese does not mean someone is intellectually challenged. Rather, obesity quietly takes away the capacity. At first, the stairs become too difficult, then walking becomes too exhausting, then sitting becomes too tiring. However, nothing about your physical appearance changes, but the capacity to perform certain actions diminishes.

Screen-based technology and its overconsumption affect us similarly. Specifically, the ability to focus on a challenging subject without resolution within thirty seconds. Reading complex documents. Solving long-term problems. Developing skills for the first six months until you are proficient enough at them to find them enjoyable. These abilities are measurable and slowly disappearing. Psychologist Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine has been logging how many minutes people spend viewing a screen before changing to another. When she began tracking in 2004, the average time was 2.5 minutes. By 2012, it had dropped to 1 minute and 15 seconds (75 seconds). At present, the number has dwindled further to approximately 47 seconds.

This is not unique to screens, but screens have made it universal. A generation ago, sustained attention was tested involuntarily, by a classroom, a long commute, a book someone handed you with nothing else to do. Today the interruption is always one thumb-swipe away, and the muscle that used to be exercised by boredom simply never contracts.

What does that produce? A generation of smart individuals, quick and capable of absorbing immense amounts of information, but unable to remain seated long enough to complete something challenging. Quick and sharp, but unable to translate into depth that holds over time. That is what employers value. That is the new line of separation, and it is happening fast. Not rich and poor. Educated and uneducated. People who can focus on one thing for two uninterrupted hours versus those who cannot.

Bangladesh needs to pay much closer attention than most other countries because it is essentially flipping this on the opposite side of the spectrum. We generally bypassed the desktop era and went straight to the cell phone, which provides us with a cheaper, endless version of the screen, before developing schools with the costlier, limited versions. Research conducted at icddr,b regarding 420 schoolchildren in Dhaka between the years 2022 and 2024 revealed that these schoolchildren averaged a total of 4.6 hours each day on digital devices, that 83% of them exceeded the two-hour mark per day, and that they slept only 7.3 hours per night, which is well below the minimum recommended sleep requirements for developing young children.

As was learned through obesity, problems that appear to be related to individual weakness are typically issues caused by abundance and low-cost options. If left solely to willpower, such problems tend to fall disproportionately on those who are economically disadvantaged. Eventually, we realised that nutrition should be treated as a matter of public policy: school meals, labelling foods based on nutritional content, and sugar taxes.

Attention deserves the same seriousness. Establishing “phone-free” school days (a practice adopted by numerous countries) represents an obvious starting point. Funding items that affluent families are quietly purchasing for their children also represents a valid starting point: teachers instead of tablets, libraries and playgrounds, and extended periods of uninterrupted afternoons. At home, households may also employ the same principle Steve Jobs used (as his family did): every household has access to this principle absolutely free.

It took us a century to recognise that an overabundance of cheap calories requires a public health response rather than individual blame. We must address the endless supply of cheap digital attention with the same urgency, as it quietly erodes the very cognitive focus we rely on to thrive.

Bangladesh’s own school system already has a version of this fight underway with mobile phone bans in some institutions, but enforcement has been inconsistent and unmeasured. A national standard, tracked the way attendance or exam results are tracked, would turn a scattered set of good intentions into a policy that can actually be evaluated.

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This article is co-authored by S M Mashrur Arafin Ayon, a Research Associate at SIPG, North South University, and Mursalin Haque, an undergraduate student at North South University.