A patient rushed into my consultation room seven minutes late. Before sitting down, he apologised twice, answered two phone calls, and checked his smartwatch repeatedly as he described feeling stressed. Then he looked at me and said, “Doctor, life has become very hectic.” His watch vibrated. Time to breathe. For a few seconds, both of us stared at the screen. He looked at me, then at the watch, then back at me, and finally took a deep breath—not because he felt like it, but because the device suggested it. Sometimes I wonder what future historians will conclude after excavating our civilisation. Perhaps humans eventually required electronics to remember functions they had performed automatically since birth.
During nearly three decades of practice, I have watched diseases evolve. Acidity changed. Sleep changed. Anxiety changed. Yet one condition slowly entered almost every consultation room regardless of age, profession, or income. Busy. Not productive. Not purposeful. Busy. A software engineer once came with severe gastritis. Exercise? No time. Cooking? No time. Sleep? Five hours. Screen time? Seven or eight. Increasingly, people spend more time consuming health content than performing health. Another patient attended office calls while I checked his pulse. “Send the file,” he said into the phone. A few seconds later, he added, “No, no, I am in an important consultation.” Then he disconnected, looked at me sincerely, and asked, “Doctor, why am I not feeling present these days?” Sometimes diagnosis arrives before symptoms.
Busyness has silently transformed into social currency. People rarely announce that they slept well or enjoyed a peaceful meal. Instead, they present exhaustion almost ceremonially. “Crazy week.” “Running on four hours.” “Back-to-back meetings.” “Didn’t even get time to eat.” These sentences sound like complaints, but occasionally they function like medals. Earlier societies often displayed status through leisure. Today, importance increasingly gets displayed through visible exhaustion. Nobody proudly says, “I finished work on time, walked daily, maintained healthy relationships, and slept properly.” That sounds suspiciously close to underachievement.
Medicine notices social change early because bodies keep records. Sleep debt accumulates quietly. Meals become small gaps between obligations. Digestion becomes chemistry. Relationships become logistics. Children create scheduling conflicts. Eventually, phones begin politely reminding people about family conversations. One young executive came complaining that his memory was worsening. Sleep was poor. Exercise absent. Phone usage excessive. I asked him something unusual. “When was the last time your brain experienced boredom?” He frowned. “What do you mean?” I explained: no music, no phone, no scrolling, no stimulation—just sitting. He thought for nearly half a minute before saying, “I honestly don’t remember.” That answer worried me more than the memory complaint itself.
Modern neuroscience discovered something deeply inconvenient. Brains are not designed only for input. Quiet periods help memories consolidate, emotions organise themselves, and creative connections appear unexpectedly. Yet modern life increasingly treats empty spaces as technical problems requiring immediate occupation. Observe people waiting at traffic signals, in elevators, in queues, at airports, or in clinics. Most are not simply waiting. They are filling. Humanity built rockets, mapped genomes, split atoms, and created machines capable of astonishing complexity. Then we collectively decided to use this nervous system primarily to check whether someone reacted to a photograph.
Attention researchers discovered another uncomfortable fact. Interrupted concentration does not immediately return after the interruption ends. Part of the mind remains behind. Modern work, therefore, resembles repeatedly leaving rooms while forgetting luggage inside each one. Perhaps this explains why so many people reach evening feeling exhausted despite being physically inactive. Humans created machines to save labour, then joined gyms to simulate it. Food delivery became instant. Digestion did not. Communication became immediate. Understanding remained stubbornly slow.
The interesting part is that patients already know this. Almost everyone says similar things. “I know I should sleep earlier.” “I know I should walk.” “I know I should stop scrolling.” Bodies hear these speeches too. Eventually, they stop negotiating. Then symptoms begin quietly. Acidity returns. Fatigue becomes normal. Constipation becomes personality. People slowly come to believe that exhaustion reflects identity rather than circumstance. Ayurveda repeatedly described health in terms of rhythms because the body seems strangely attached to repetition. Hunger prefers timing. Sleep prefers timing. Even bowel movements prefer timing. Only humans decided that biology should become negotiable.
There is also something unintentionally funny about modern solutions. We buy watches that remind us to stand, install applications that teach breathing, purchase expensive lamps to simulate sunlight because we rarely encounter it, and increasingly use water bottles that remind adults to drink water. Imagine explaining this sentence to grandparents: “My bottle forgot to remind me to hydrate.” Technology saved labour, accelerated transport, simplified communication, and reduced countless forms of physical effort. Yet almost everybody feels poorer in time than previous generations. Where exactly did the saved hours go? Perhaps time behaves like money. The more efficiently humans produce it, the faster humans invent methods to spend it.
Sometimes what patients describe as burnout is not exhaustion at all. It is grief. Grief that years disappeared into traffic, passwords, loading screens, OTPs, meetings, subscriptions, notifications, emails, and pending tasks. A surprising number of consultations eventually arrive at the same sentence: “Days are going.” Not dramatic suffering. Something quieter. The realisation that months disappeared while people were attempting to become more efficient.
After evening consultations, I occasionally sit outside the clinic and watch people pass. Delivery workers rush home. Students walk while scrolling. Parents talk on their phones while crossing the road. Earphones remain inserted. Screens glow against faces. Occasionally, an elderly man walks slowly past the clinic without visible hurry, an optimisation strategy, a productivity podcast, or a measurable self-improvement plan. Last week I saw that stressed patient again. Same watch. Same reminders. Same pace. As he left, the watch vibrated once more. Time to breathe. This time he ignored it, answered another call, crossed the road, and disappeared into traffic.
