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I am not romanticising the past. I am not advocating to stop using smartphones altogether. What I am saying is that people by and large don't seem to use it in a healthy way.

It seems many of the folks are using smartphones exactly in the way you describe- as an ill defined and uncertain but good enough means to plug some passing hole in your day. Is that good? I don't know. Are you losing out on using that time to prioritize what matters to you? Probably. The most damning thing about this is that you are constantly reaching for something with no fixed outcome planned in advance and allow that to temporarily occupy your mental space (if I wanted to exaggerate I'd say "hijack your mind"). This does not look like a good thing to me.