The Real Cost of Smart Phones

By: Ms. Muqaddas Ghuman

Evaluating cost and benefits is an innate human trait. Today, the capitalist world has conditioned us to measure costs and benefits purely in material terms. Allah addresses man’s innate nature in Surah Al-Asr and redefines loss and benefit by not failure to accumulate material gains but by how we spend our time. The unit here for evaluation of cost and benefit is time, making it our most vital asset, yet it is eroding, passing quickly, and stealing our life from us. Isn’t every second passing making me closer to my true success or ultimate loss?

To avoid utter loss, we must continuously invest our passing moments into all of the four minimum criteria for salvation (Nijat): faith (Iman), righteous deeds, calling to truth, and urging steadfastness. Every new decision, new ideology, new habit, trend, or piece of technology, a new gadget must be evaluated against this four-part standard to determine whether they lead to genuine success or ultimate bankruptcy. Naturally, this puts our smartphones and social media in question.

Our sworn enemy, Satan the accursed, will fill the narrow gap between this question and its answer with comforting labels calling digital enslavement "productivity," "staying connected," “entertainment,” or "seeking knowledge." He persuades us that the machine is ‘value neutral’ (which it may well be), and the choice to use it correctly is up to us. That choice does remain with us, and modern technology can be used fruitfully to supplement our real faith-based needs, however, we must reject the lullaby of Satan (whispers) to becoming addicted to the ‘new age’ and stand accountable before Allah, before Satan controls our relationship with our phones. We must ask ourselves the hard questions.

Did we wish to set a simple morning alarm intending to sleep, only to surrender the night’s sleep to a spiral of mindless swiping—waking up exhausted and robbed of khushu in our Fajr? Or waking up with a stressful stream of notifications instead of Bismillah and remembrance of Allah? Did we sign up for missing our Fajr prayer merely while snoozing an alarm and getting trapped into notifications? Did we wish to miss on the morning Barakah, the recitation of the Holy Qur’an during Fajr (Al-Isra: 78) and Azkar? Clearly, we did not sign up for all this yet somehow we remain helplessly hooked.

We sure did not want to surrender our Qur’anic values to every random online influencer who quietly reshape how we think, dress, act, and live without us even realizing it? A modernist ‘scholar’, who invents fantastic stories about Gog and Magog, quoting from every Tom, Dick and Harry to captivate vulnerable and uninformed audience with an ‘explanation’ that didn’t exist for fourteen and a half centuries? Did we choose to carry an addictive market (online shopping) in our pockets at all times, ignoring the warning that the marketplace is among the most disliked places to Allah (Sahih Muslim)? Did we wish to indulge in Israf with an instant, effortless click? Did we wish to lose our Haya (modesty) one reel at a time, or worse still ‘free’ AI roleplaying? Which one of us wanted to compromise the sweetness of Iman by violating ghaz e basr (Musnad Ahmad)? Did we intend to ignore the elderly sitting next to us while socializing with people far away or did we intend to brush our child’s eager questions and needs while our attention is diverted to “digital needs”?  It is clear that smartphones are made to be addictive. We end up using them in ways we never intended. They are no longer simple tools in our hands; instead, we have become the tool of the digital attention economy. They are pouring billions of dollars to keep us hooked.

To see what we are giving away to tech companies in exchange for "free" convenience, consider the true cost: spending 5 hours a day on a phone adds up to over a day every week, nearly a week every month, and roughly two full months every year. Over a 60-year lifespan, that means 12.5 years of our lives are surrendered to the screen. Yet time is not our only loss—we are also selling our focus and our faith. Picking up a phone 96 times a day shatters our concentration, requiring over 23 minutes to regain deep focus after a single interruption.

We must ask ourselves a basic calculation: Is the convenience of quick ‘mindless’ communication worth paying for with our Iman, our values, and our peace of mind? Is losing Qur’anic guidance not too high a price for endless scrolling? Heedlessness (ghaflah) begins with a simple distraction, and ends in spiritual death. To protect our true assets, we must treat our time and attention as a sacred trust, put firm boundaries on our screens, and remember our primary purpose: we were created to worship, not scroll.