The screen glows. It’s 4:00 AM, and you’re staring at a piece of glass that’s warmer than your lukewarm Suhoor oatmeal. Between the targeted ads for luxury prayer mats and the "get ready with me" videos that somehow involve three layers of foundation before sunrise, Hina Khan appears. She’s an actress, a reality TV veteran, and currently, your digital spiritual advisor.

"I know after hours of..." she starts.

The sentence hangs there, dangling like a notification you can’t swipe away. It’s the classic influencer hook—the empathetic "I see you" that bridges the gap between a celebrity’s airbrushed reality and your actual, thirsty life. Khan is sharing advice for those fasting during Ramadan, and while the sentiment is nice, the medium is the message. And the message is exhausting.

We’ve reached a weird peak in the attention economy where even the act of not eating has to be optimized for the feed. Khan’s advice centers on the physiological crash—that specific, late-afternoon brain fog where your IQ drops ten points for every hour you’re away from a caffeine fix. She’s telling her followers to be mindful, to pace themselves, to remember the "why" behind the hunger. It’s solid advice. It’s also advice you could get from your grandmother, provided your grandmother didn’t have 19 million Instagram followers and a professional lighting setup.

The friction here isn't the religious practice itself. It’s the digital friction of the "Wellness Industrial Complex" colonizing a holy month. To follow Khan’s advice, you have to be on the platform. To be on the platform, you have to navigate a minefield of distractions. It’s a bit rich to receive tips on mindfulness from an app designed by literal neuroscientists to keep your dopamine loops firing like a pinball machine.

There’s a cost to this. Not just the data plan or the battery health of your iPhone 15, but the mental overhead. When a celebrity like Khan shares "thoughtful advice," it’s rarely just a one-off thought. It’s part of a broader content strategy. In the influencer world, Ramadan isn't just a time for reflection; it’s a high-engagement seasonal event. The "I know after hours of..." line is the preamble to a relatable moment that ensures her metrics don't dip while she’s taking her own break from the cameras.

Khan talks about the struggle of the long hours. She’s right. It is a struggle. But the irony is thick enough to choke on: we use these devices to distract us from the fast, then use them to consume content about how to handle the fast, which in turn makes us spend more time staring at the blue light that's probably giving us the headache we’re trying to ignore. It’s a closed loop. A digital Ouroboros in a designer hijab.

The advice itself is often a mix of basic biology and "live, laugh, love" platitudes. Drink water. Don’t overindulge at Iftar. Be patient with your temper. It’s the kind of stuff that should be common sense, but in the age of the smartphone, common sense doesn't scale. Content scales. Engagement scales. If Khan says it with the right filter and the right soft-focus background, it feels like a revelation. If your mom says it, it’s just an annoyance.

Let’s talk about the specific trade-off. To get this "thoughtful" insight, you’re handing over your most valuable non-renewable resource: your attention. During a month that is ostensibly about disconnecting from worldly distractions and focusing on the internal, we are increasingly tethered to the external. We are checking our watches to see when we can eat, and then checking our feeds to see how Hina Khan is feeling about not eating.

It’s the gamification of piety. We’ve turned the most private of sacrifices into a public-facing performance, moderated by algorithms that don't care about your soul, only your dwell time. Khan is just a player in the game. She’s good at it, too. She knows how to phrase a caption so it hits the "Explore" page. She knows which hashtags will trigger the most "Ameen" comments.

But at the end of the day, when the sun finally drops below the horizon and the dates are passed around the table, the phone stays on. It sits right there next to the water glass. We’ve been told how to fast, how to pray, and how to feel by a screen that never sleeps.

Is advice actually thoughtful if it requires you to ignore the person sitting right next to you to read it? Probably not. But hey, it looked great in the stories.

Who knew that the hardest part of fasting in 2024 wouldn't be the hunger, but the urge to check if a stranger online thinks you’re doing it right?