Serendipity

There’s a moment, late at night, when the world is still and the only glow comes from the screen in my hand. My eyes are tired, my thoughts restless, but I keep scrolling, keep watching, keep consuming. Not because I’m looking for something—just because I don’t know how to stop.

I used to think my phone was just a tool, a window into the world, a way to stay connected. And in many ways, it is. It holds messages from people I love, songs that have carried me through heartbreak, photos of moments I never want to forget. It makes the distant feel near, the lonely feel less alone. But somewhere along the way, it became more than that. It became the thing I reached for when I didn’t want to sit with my own thoughts, the thing that filled the spaces where silence used to be.

We don’t talk enough about what that does to us. How we’ve trained ourselves to flinch at quiet, to seek distraction before we even recognize the discomfort. How the simple act of being alone—truly alone, without a screen between us and the moment—feels foreign, almost unbearable.

A friend told me she doesn’t know who she is without her phone. "When I’m not online, I feel like I don’t exist," she said. And I understood. Because so much of our identity now is shaped by what we share, by how others see us. We curate our lives into highlights, into carefully chosen moments, and somewhere in the process, we lose the messy, unfiltered parts of ourselves. The parts that don’t fit into a caption. The parts that can’t be edited or perfected.

Another friend told me how she hated looking in the mirror for too long. “The more I stare, the less it looks like me,”. And then she’d open her phone, scroll through endless images of people she didn’t know, faces smoothed and sculpted by filters and angles, and wonder why she couldn’t look like that.

And then there’s me. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve picked up my phone without thinking, without meaning to, just to avoid the weight of my own mind. I’ve stayed up too late, not because I wanted to, but because the next post, the next video, the next distraction kept pulling me in. I’ve let the glow of a screen be a substitute for warmth, for company, for presence.

And then there’s the loneliness. The kind that creeps in even when you’re surrounded by people, because somehow, the endless connection has made us feel more disconnected than ever. We spend hours watching other people’s lives, comparing, wishing, convincing ourselves that everyone else is happier, more successful, more something than we are. We talk less, call less, sit in silence together while our thumbs scroll through different worlds. And when we do put the phone down, we don’t know what to say.

I won’t blame the phone entirely. Because the phone is not the villain. It is a tool, and like any tool, it can build or destroy depending on how we use it. But I do think we need to ask ourselves: Are we using it, or is it using us?

Because mental health isn’t just about the big things—trauma, loss, heartbreak. It’s also about the little things, the daily habits, the way we treat our minds when we think no one is watching. It’s about whether we allow ourselves to rest, to be present, to exist without the need for validation. And if our phones are keeping us from that—if they are making us anxious, restless, unable to sit with our own thoughts—then maybe, just maybe, it really is the phone.

Life is not lived through a screen. It’s in the pauses, the breaths between sentences, the quiet spaces where we learn who we are. And I don’t want to lose those moments—not to my phone, not to anything.