Surely as a community we need to wake up, see what's going on around us, and do something about it.
There are serious amounts of screen time being clocked up, with the recent advent of highly addictive software, apps available 24 hours and teenagers locked away in their rooms on devices.
Nowadays, if someone is sitting alone gazing into space enjoying a coffee, young people will think they are some weird psycho, "they don't even have a phone".
Not only is it a scourge on our community, stopping people interacting, now research is coming out highlighting the severe mental health issues that have arrive, issues that many knew were inevitable.
With the impending mental health train crash on the horizon, resulting from this recent invasion of devices into our society, sport more than ever, needs to step up to help fight off this plague, and be a vehicle to help keep our youth engaged in a healthy lifestyle.
We are hearing more and more stories from school teachers about the anxiety and depressive behaviours of their students, not just secondary school, but down into primary school as well.
There are even cases of early childhood education centres wanting to have devices available for all their little tots.
Lack of sleep is a massive issue, and the blue screens are designed to keep us up, all of which can't help our very sad high rates of youth suicide.
Even within the sports industry, we have supposed experts throwing their hands in the air, and saying "oh well, technology is here, let's embrace it" – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Fortnite, go for it.
Yes some athletes need them for their business, promoting their brands, but that's a different story.
Technology companies have managed to convince many schools that devices are a necessity for modern learning, and in doing so some schools are helping normalise devices into humanity, helping form the addiction in youth, and helping the billion-dollar companies get kids hooked.
Many aren't convinced by the promise of improved academic outcomes via devices, some still believe the more tangible old-school methods, the abacus and counting blocks, are a better foundation for maths, for example.
Seeing how tired and nasty a kid can be after having a session on their device is scary, mentally drained and pulled away from that thing they crave, can result in some pretty epic melt-downs.
Of course youth need to learn technology skills, but that, and an addiction to apps and games is a different story. And surely job-specific skills can be learnt later.
The apps and games are specifically designed by master engineers, to be addictive. Created by genius geeks, the best in the world, because of the huge dollars up for grabs in the industry.
They play on the natural human desire to be liked - the attention industry. They need to grab our attention, and keep it, the designers are expert at it – once kids are hooked, it's tough to give up.
Giving up is like cold-turkey, so for a busy parent coming home stressed and tired, the last thing we want to engage in is a fight with our kids. And a fight is exactly what happens when trying to extract someone from their device activity they are addicted to. It's too easy just to let it slide, let them have the device, so we can get some peace and quiet.
So what's all this got to do with sport? Well sport can't solve all the worlds problems, but like other human activities and interests, sport and sporting groups can definitely try to play their part.
Sport can be a vehicle for change – and sports organisations could look at what they can do. We have smoke-free zones, so what about device-free zones? At least try to limit the access, and let's make it cool, cool to say no to devices.
We need to get kids hooked on something else, and for so many, sport can be that thing.
Marcus Agnew is the health and sport development manager at Hawke's Bay Community Fitness Centre Trust and is also a lecturer in sports science at EIT.
