I am a people person. An extrovert. A golden retriever, tongue lolling at the sight of humans. Where some may need to retreat to a secluded place to recharge before facing more of our species, I am the opposite. Complimenting a stranger’s outfit, saying “bless you” to the old man who just sneezed in the grocery store, catching up with an old friend, each of these is a tiny boost of power to the ol’ Shirah battery. 

Somewhere along the way, connection has started feeling less like something I stumbled into and more like something I had to manage. I noticed myself outsourcing the uncomfortable parts of human interaction to avoid the risk of being misunderstood—systems that reward me for saying the perfectly neutral thing, for having the correct amount of outrage pointed in just the right direction. This was easier and less vulnerable. But curating my thoughts this way became near impossible to execute in real time with someone standing 2 feet away waiting for my response. So for over a decade, I have been self-medicating with manufactured connection scrimped from social media and optimizing the human out of me. 

I know. I know. Social media hasn’t been a source of anything of the kind in a long, long time. Like someone slowly coming to the realization they are in a toxic relationship, I have been recognizing the signs, but reluctant to make my exit. Until recently when I experienced a special type of “ick” that has had me looking for a way out ever since. 

Coming to Terms

I was on Youtube, looking for something to stir my cold, dead soul; delusionally trying to awaken my faculties so I could be incinerated by the creative spark that would finally cure me of my overconsumptive zombification. A video essay caught my eye so I started watching. Within the first minute, I realized that though there was an actual man speaking, his script was most like AI generated. 

While I don’t actually hate AI, the realization that the words I was hearing were AI generated left me feeling absolutely deflated. If I wanted to, I could have logged onto ChatGPT and had a pleasant but faux conversation without ever even having to open Youtube. I was trying to feed a Golden Retriever’s hunger with holographic kibble. The script was artificial, and thus the connection I was seeking for was as well. 

Is this a dis on that Youtube creator? Absolutely not. The world has plenty of voices telling people how they should and shouldn’t express themselves. But it got me reconsidering my digital hygiene, because even content created completely organically, strictly from human thought, isn’t satiating this vastly expanding sense of loneliness I feel. 

Deferred Living

You know that feeling when you wake up the day after a party or holiday and instead of eating a sensible breakfast, you reach for candy, cake or something salty and crunchy? There’s this fullness in your stomach, but it feels dense and bloated and gross. My post-doomscrolling day feels a lot like that. I am uncomfortable in my own mind. There’s this swollen emptiness that leaves me easily irritated and inundated with self-loathing. 

But how do you even escape your own mind when you’re feeling like this? The answer is you can’t. Just like with the junk food, all you can do is let your body try to process it and find something of value to keep and crap out the rest. 

Then I do it all over again. Why? Because my phone is like a warm bed on a dark January morning. Beguiling. Warm. Soft. And oh so comfortable. Why would I want to leave it and face the world, or my job, or even just the brisk morning air? But that bed doesn’t fill my growling stomach. The bed doesn’t provide for my basic human needs. There are no proverbial growing pains to be experienced from under my covers. So yeah, there are no growing pains, but there is also no growth. So I know I should leave—and I will!

Just give me five more minutes.

The problem is that “five more minutes” has turned into five years. And a bed you never leave eventually stops feeling like a sanctuary and more like a cage. My mind is starting to itch from the lack of friction. Time is moving on while I’m stuck here convincing myself that the perfect moment to change is just around the corner. 

Taking the Wheel

So the hunger for something real has become a tiny bit louder than the siren song of the algorithm duvet. But only loud enough for me to pull my head up enough to realize I’ve been a passenger in my own brain, letting a machine drive me through a landscape carefully curated by synthesized thoughts and incentives while I dozed in the passenger seat. I have to acknowledge that the warmth of my phone is a fake warmth; it’s the heat of a piss-poor battery when what I really need is the heat of the sun. To rediscover the high-value experiences I crave, I have to throw the covers off and step into the hallway of the unknown. I have to grab the steering wheel with hands that are still shaking from the cold and decide where I want to go, even if I don’t have a map. 

Because here is the truth that makes my blood really boil. There are people out there—brilliant, cynical people in glass offices—whose entire job is to ensure I stay in this bed. Every “five more minutes” I give to the screen is another coin on their money conveyor belt. How did I allow my attention, my thoughts, my opinions to be turned into this diluted fodder to fill their obscenely large bank accounts?

But to them, my stagnation isn’t a tragedy. It’s a successful business quarter. They think they’ve finally built a cage I’ll never want to escape, but they forgot one thing:

They can drain our time and our data, but our free will is the only resource they can’t harvest. You can’t deplete a resource that regenerates every time I say “No.” 

What If We Decided We Were No Longer Harvestable?

There are those who would have us think of ourselves as a “product” of our environment, but I hate that word. A product is something finished, packaged and sold. Yes, our attention is being sold to the highest bidder, but the irrevocable truth is that our minds and thoughts can never be reduced to just data sets. They are as unique as fingerprints. 

You are not a product. You are a living legacy. A messy, beautiful intersection of generations of familial habits, traditions, and the strange psychological alchemy of nature and nurture. There are infinite possibilities of how these ingredients manifest in any one of us, and that’s one thing the glass-office-people can’t account for. They can predict what you’ll click, but they can’t simulate the way your specific history makes you feel when you see a spectacular sunset over the most mundane grocery store parking lot, or how your chest seizes just a little when a complete stranger does some small but unexpectedly kind gesture towards you. 

Those are the kind of moments I want to start chasing. The algorithm can trick me, threaten me with FOMO, or tempt me back into the warmth of the duvet, but it can never actually take the wheel. Remember that “brisk air” I was talking about before? Acknowledging just how much of my situation is my own responsibility has been like a blasting, stinging arctic north wind right to the face. Even the act of surrendering my power is a choice I make. And if I have the power to surrender it, I have the power to snatch it back again and again.

First Steps

But if I’m being completely real, snatching the wheel back is only part of the battle. Not knowing where to go from here is terrifying for me—debilitating, even. I’m not going to sit here and pretend like this is me establishing myself as the next internet guru. This was a persuasive essay. This is just me thinking out loud to myself, trying to hear my own inner voice over the hum of the conveyor belt of late stage capitalism. The truth is, I don’t have all the answers.  If I were to offer only one piece of advice for anyone reading this an nodding along (Hey! Thanks for being here!), it would be to find your anchor. Some sort of Higher Power. 

Personally, mine is my faith in Jesus Christ. In a digital sea where everything is fluid and every truth is tailored to keep me scrolling, my Higher Power is the one fixed point that doesn’t move. My relationship with Him is my ongoing evaluation of how I measure what is real. My faith is what reminds me that our hearts and minds are far more precious than the glass-office-people will admit. 

Maybe religion isn’t your thing and that’s fine. I’m not one of those Christians who goes around declaring I know the whole, perfect truth of the universe, but I will invite you to find your own version of that anchor; that fixed point. Believe that you are worth more than this beige, watered down existence being manufactured around us. Believe that the people you see through the screen—even the ones on a completely different algorithm track than you—are worth more than the outrage they are being used to generate.

So this is it. This is me shouting into a sea of millions of digital voices, just to prove to myself  still have breath in my lungs. I am going searching for the real thing. 

I’m finally out of bed.