Google Knows Me, But I Don't Know Myself

In a hyper-connected world, a young Kashmiri voices the anguish of a generation fluent in data but foreign to its own depths.

- Meer Shahzaib

Mornings in Kashmir begin with a blue glow. Not the sky. The screen. The first breath is not breath. It’s a refresh. Our thumbs swipe before our eyes open fully. There's no pause, only feed. And somehow, in all that speed, we've forgotten how to sit still. How to just be.

We know the world. But do we know ourselves?

Ask anyone on the street in Srinagar how many times they touched their phone today. They won't know. Ask them how they're really feeling. They'll hesitate, joke, deflect. That's the story now: a generation fluent in trivia, but tongue-tied in the language of the self.

We're overflowing with information. Flooded. Drowning in articles, apps, updates, alerts. Everything explained, nothing understood. We know the signs of climate collapse but not the cause of our own coldness. We can recite steps to happiness but forget what our own laughter sounds like. Our memories now live in cloud folders. Our emotions, in archived chats.

There's something tender and tragic about it.

Take Arooj, nineteen, from Rainawari. Her phone speaks ten languages. She's read about love, grief, healing, and quoted it too. But when night falls and the silence thickens, she writes one line in her diary: “I feel like I don't live in my own life.” She is a digital scholar. But her soul? A locked screen.