When the Feed Starts Thinking for You: Nikhil Kalita on Why We Must “Don’t Get Influenced by Influencers”
At 11 years old, after an unremarkable argument with his mother, Nikhil Kalita did something increasingly rare for someone his age: he picked up a pen instead of a phone. By morning, he had written his first story about a boy - nothing grand and something about the experience of putting words on paper that night convinced him he had found his way of making sense of the world. Reading it back the next morning, he says, "proved that writing came naturally," and it sent him down a rabbit hole of reading, research, and what he calls "deeper topics."
Nearly two decades later, that instinct has produced a book whose title functions as a dare: Don't Get Influenced by Influencers. Published on May 8, 2026, it became by the author's account, an unexpected word-of-mouth hit within its first two months, a fate that carries a certain irony: a book warning against algorithmic culture, amplified by the very algorithms it critiques.
Kalita, who grew up in a middle-class family and says writing was "never part of a big master plan," speaks about his work with the certainty of someone who has thought through every objection in advance. Ask him what he means by being "influenced," and he answers like a man defining a crime: "passively absorbing someone else's opinions, habits, and lifestyle without running them through a critical filter." Press him on where the blame lies, and he doesn't spare his own audience. The creators, he argues, are simply doing their jobs optimizing for attention. The surrender of judgment, he says, is "mental laziness" on the viewer's part.
"Responsibility ultimately falls on the viewer," Kalita said in an interview. "Content creators design videos for maximum views, but letting someone else do the thinking is just mental laziness on our part."
It is an unsparing thesis, and Kalita knows it. He promises readers that the book will make them "uncomfortable", a promise he treats almost as a product feature. "This isn't a traditional self-help book," he said, "but taking it seriously will change your perspective on time and focus."
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The Attention Economy, From the Inside
The book's central observation is almost embarrassingly simple: people are handing their focus to screens, and the screens are built to take it. Short-form video, in Kalita's framing, is not entertainment but conditioning. Scrolling, he argues, "trains the brain to expect instant hits of entertainment," so that sitting down to think seriously about anything complicated begins to feel physically impossible.
His prescription is equally blunt: leave the feed. "Verifying claims using books, offline sources, or direct research keeps the mind from relying on the same algorithm to fact-check itself," he said. The line captures the book's essential logic that the only way out of algorithmic capture is to exit the environment where the algorithm operates.
On the question of why influencers wield such power over young people, Kalita points to a psychological trick hiding in plain sight: hours of daily exposure create a false intimacy. "Constant visibility and relatable content build a false sense of closeness over time," he said. "Random online personalities gradually turn into trusted guides in a viewer's mind."
And credibility, in this economy, is mostly costume. View counts, subscriber tallies, polished editing all of it gets "constantly mistaken for actual expertise," he said. "Confidence on camera gets confused with real-world knowledge every single day."
His bright line for legitimate versus irresponsible influence is refreshingly unromantic: anything touching health, money, or career should never be decided on the basis of a short video. "Recommending high-risk choices without professional credentials or real accountability is where influence crosses into irresponsible territory," he said.
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A Title of His Own, and a Fight Over It
If Kalita's critique of the creator economy reads like a provocation, the story behind his book's title is stranger still. In July 2026, a traditional publishing offer arrived one that required the book to be temporarily unlisted from Amazon while it was reissued. During that window, in August 2026, another author, Sher Singh Saini, published a book with an almost identical title: Don't Get Influenced by Influencers: A Gen Z Guide to Thinking for Yourself in the Age of Likes, Trends & Fake Gurus.
Kalita's response has been characteristically direct. "A formal notice has been served to the publishing house regarding this copycat title," he said, and he offers what he calls timestamped proof: the May 8 release date and screenshots to anyone who doubts the chronology, inviting verification via direct message on Instagram at @nikhilkalitaentrr. It is, notably, the same medium whose grip he warns against, deployed in defense of the book that warns against it.
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Five Rules for the Feed
For those who ask what, practically, a young person is supposed to do with all this, Kalita has a list of five rules he says can restore a measure of sovereignty over a scroll-dominated day:
Question the profit. Always look at what the creator gains when you believe or buy their recommendation.
Cap the screen time. Prevent auto-play and endless reels from owning your day.
Check outside the app. Never accept an online claim without cross-checking real sources beyond social media.
Separate numbers from truth. High follower counts are not expert knowledge.
Keep unplugged hours. Set aside daily screen-free time to think without digital interference.
The rules share a single through line: the feed will not save you from itself, so you have to build an exit. Whether enough readers will take that exit rather than simply watching a video about the book about the problem with videos remains the open question of Kalita's project.
For his part, he is already working on what comes next. But he is clear about what he wants from this one: not agreement, not comfort, but a moment of recognition, the same kind he had at 11, alone with a pen, discovering that his own thoughts were worth writing down.
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