The Truth Wasn't Trending

The first thing I reach for every morning is my phone. Not because I am waiting for an important message. Not because someone needs me. It has simply become a habit. Before I am fully awake, my hand already reaches for the screen. A notification. A video. A message. A news headline. Then another notification. Before I even get out of bed, I have already seen hundreds of things. My phone knows what videos I like, which songs I skip, what posts make me angry and what pictures make me stop scrolling. Sometimes I wonder: am I using my phone, or is my phone using me?

I grew up in a small town in Kerala. When I was younger, evenings were simple. My friends and I played cricket in the street. We rode bicycles through the narrow roads. We sat together and talked for hours. There were no endless notifications. But things have changed. Now, almost everyone around me carries a phone everywhere. I do too. At school, our conversations often begin with something we saw online. “Did you see that video?” “Have you tried that new AI app?” “Did you see what he posted?” “What is trending today?” There is always something new. And I always wanted to keep up.

One morning, my friend Rahul showed me a video. “You haven’t seen this?” I shook my head. “You’re seriously behind!” I opened my phone. I watched the video. Then another one appeared. Then another. When I looked up, almost thirty minutes had passed. I could not even remember why I had opened my phone. This happened more and more. I would open my phone to check one message and end up watching videos for an hour. I would sit down to study and suddenly find myself watching cricket clips. At night, I would say, “Just one more video,” and then stay awake much longer than I planned. The strange thing was that I did not feel happy after all that scrolling. I just felt tired.

Then politics became part of my daily phone life too. Politics was nothing new in Kerala. My father and his friends often talked about politics while having tea. My grandfather read the newspaper every morning. During elections, our roads filled with flags, posters, speeches and arguments. But social media made politics different. Political news could now reach me at any time.

One Monday morning, our class WhatsApp group suddenly became very active. Someone had shared a screenshot with a big headline: “Government to Stop Financial Support for Students Next Month.” Below the headline was a picture of a government building. The message said that several student benefits would soon be stopped. Within minutes, everyone was talking about it. “This will affect us!” “What are they doing?” “This is unfair!” Someone shared a video of a politician talking about the issue. Another person blamed the government. I read the message again. I became angry too. Without checking whether it was true, I typed, “They don’t care about students at all.” Some of my friends agreed with me. The group quickly turned into an argument. Some people supported the government. Others attacked it.

Then Rahul sent a simple message: “Where is the original government order?” Nobody answered. A few minutes later, he wrote, “I searched for it. I can’t find it.” I stopped. I opened Google and searched for the news myself. I could not find the announcement either. Then I checked the date on the screenshot. It was several months old. I looked for the original document. The truth was very different. The document was about a proposal that was still being discussed. It did not say that student support had been cancelled. The video was misleading too. A short part of a longer speech had been cut out. The full speech gave a completely different meaning. I stared at my phone. Only a few minutes earlier, I had been angry about something that had never actually happened. I deleted my message from the group. But it was too late. The screenshot had already been shared many times.

That evening, I told my father what had happened. He listened quietly. “Did you check the news before reacting?” he asked. “No.” He looked at me and said, “Then you were not reacting to the news. You were reacting to someone’s version of the news.” I thought about that for a long time.

After that day, I started checking political news before believing or sharing it. I looked for the original source. I checked the date. I watched the full video instead of just a short clip. I compared different news reports. Sometimes the news was true. Sometimes it was old news. Sometimes the headline was scary, but the actual story was much less serious. I slowly understood something. False information does not always look false. Sometimes it uses a real photograph with a false caption. Sometimes an old story is shared as if it happened today. Sometimes a real speech is cut into a short video to change its meaning. And sometimes a message is repeated so many times that people believe it simply because everyone else believes it.

One evening, my grandfather saw me checking a news story on my phone. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Trying to see if this is true.” He smiled. “When I was young, we had one newspaper in the house. Everyone read the same one.” “And now?” I asked. He pointed at my phone. “Now you have a thousand newspapers in your pocket.” I laughed. Then he said, “But having more information does not always mean knowing more.” That sentence stayed with me.

A few days later, I decided to take a break from social media. At first, it was difficult. Whenever I felt bored, my hand automatically reached for my phone. I wondered what my friends were posting. I worried that I might miss a new trend, a joke or some important news. But after a few days, something changed. I started noticing things around me. I noticed the sound of rain hitting the window. I noticed that my mother had started growing vegetables in a small garden. I noticed the old man near our house sitting outside every evening and watching the road. I noticed how beautiful the sky looked after a heavy monsoon shower. These things had always been there. I had simply stopped noticing them.

I also started spending more time with my younger sister. Earlier, whenever she came to talk to me while I was using my phone, I would say, “Wait, I’m busy.” Now I listened to her. One evening, she looked at me and asked, “Why aren’t you using your phone?” “I am trying to spend less time on it,” I said. She looked surprised. “Can you really do that?” I laughed. “I am trying.” “Good luck!” she said.

My break from social media did not make me hate technology. I still used my phone. I still watched videos. I still followed the news. I still enjoyed new trends. But I started making my own choices. I realised that I did not have to follow every trend just because everyone else was following it. I did not have to dislike someone just because they supported a different political party. I did not have to believe a message simply because a friend had sent it. And I did not have to have an opinion about everything.

That last lesson was the hardest. Online, everyone seems to have an opinion about everything. Something happens, and within minutes thousands of people start commenting. I used to feel that I also had to say something. Now, sometimes, I simply tell myself, “I don’t know enough about this yet.” And I have learned that it is okay to say that.

One day, Rahul saw me checking the source of a political post before sharing it. He laughed. “Arun, you have become a fact-checking machine!” I smiled. “Better than becoming a forwarding machine.” We both laughed.

Life did not suddenly become simple. There were still new trends. There were still political arguments. There were still fake messages. Technology was still moving faster than I could understand. But something inside me had changed. I had stopped allowing the internet to decide everything I should see, think about and feel.

One Sunday evening, I went to the beach with my family. The sky was turning orange. The waves were moving gently towards the shore. I took out my phone to take a photograph. Then I stopped. For a few seconds, I simply looked at the sea. No scrolling. No notifications. No arguments. Just the sound of the waves.

I suddenly realised something. I had spent so much time trying to keep up with the changing world that I had forgotten to live in it. The world will always change. New technology will come. New trends will appear. New political issues will arise. People will disagree. New information will fill our screens every day. I cannot control all of that. But I can control what I believe, what I share and what I give my time to.

My phone may know my habits. An algorithm may know what I like. Social media may tell me what is trending. But none of them can decide who I should become. That decision is still mine.

I put my phone back into my pocket and walked towards my family. For once, I did not feel the need to check my screen. I was finally paying attention to the world around me.