Sleepless Generation(s): How the Attention Economy Steals Our Sleep

Smartphones keep us awake, but do they harm all age groups equally? Drawing on time-displacement and cognitive-arousal theory, we link late-night screen minutes, location of use, and device tier to lost sleep. An industry partner supplied six hundred million app-usage records from thirty thousand U.S. users collected between 2018 and 2025. We turn these logs into daily measures of engagement and attention frag-mentation, test our ideas with multilevel and structural-equation models, and double-check them with a deep-learning forecast. Our initial findings reveal a "dark side" of the attention economy that hits younger generations hardest and highlight design and policy levers for healthier digital habits.