Till late 2014, an Android phone eluded me. While the world was catching up on that paraphernalia, I settled almost doggedly for my humble Symbian, which came in the form of a Nokia E72. It had completed over four years with me, and I found it hard to give up on the device, even though it would freeze each time I attempted to open Facebook, or text on WhatsApp. The phone had been purchased when "push email" was still a novelty — the excitement was palpable, when for the first time, I was notified about an email in my inbox. But, the over-heating battery of the qwerty phone finally gave up on me one fine day, and I had to reluctantly join the bandwagon. Life hasn't been the same ever since.

In the light of a new book, Your Happiness was Hacked by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever (Penguin Random House), a rather timely work on the problems of tech addiction and how it is controlling our lives and well-being, it felt like self-introspection was the need of the hour. Not too long ago, London-based tech blogger Jamie Bartlett in his book, The People Vs Tech, cautioned us to employ self-control while using the Internet. "Hordes of us are now members of a zombie army that walks while looking down at our phones," he wrote. Wadhwa, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering, and Salkever, a technology leader and author, share similar concerns. The paranoia about us being the last generation to remember a life before technology invasion, is very real.