I’m not sure what I’ve done to alert the feed gods, but they keep pelting me with content like: “here’s how I set up 55 AI agents to work overnight so I can sip coffee and levitate above labour.” Naturally, like a well-trained modern idiot, I clicked again this morning.
Partly because I’m genuinely curious about weird and wonderful agentic AI use cases. Partly because the internet is a casino that lets you pretend you’re doing research.
Then I resurfaced and had that now-familiar feeling: another slice of life had melted away, almost invisibly.
I’ve written before that time is the only real currency. Still true. But I think there’s a deeper problem underneath it.
We are not just losing time. We are losing texture.
A couple of excellent articles I’ll link in the comments helped me sharpen this. The basic idea is simple: modern feeds are full of supernormal stimuli, coloured eggs for the human brain. They are more vivid than reality, more compressed, more engineered, more emotionally loaded than ordinary life is ever meant to be.
And once you spend enough time in those environments, something subtle happens – you start living inside the heads of other people.
Their edits. Their incentives. Their aesthetics. Their highlight reels. Their bizarre productivity cosplay. You judge yourself by the inflated outsides of people’s curated selves online.
Boom – real life starts to feel underpowered.
The room is just a room. Your work feels slower than somebody else’s “systems”. Your thoughts feel less original than the polished certainty in the feed. And after enough exposure, the feed does not just steal time, it resets your baseline. Ordinary life starts to feel dull not because it is dull, but because your expectation of stimulation has been grotesquely inflated.
The other trap is that this can feel like flow, but isn’t. Real flow stretches you. This version just absorbs you. You emerge having spent time, not deepened it.
That’s the part that bothers me.
Not some theatrical collapse of identity. Something quieter and probably more common: you get a bit disconnected from your own pace, taste and thoughts. At the limit, you become a slightly more generic LLM for your own life, wanting the average of what other people seem to want.
The answer is probably much less glamorous than the disease.
Boredom. Or more precisely, stimulus-free time long enough for your own mind to become audible again.
No grand detox manifesto. Just a small act of rebellion against synthetic intensity. A walk with no music, no podcast, no phone in hand. Just you, the day, and whatever turns up when nothing is trying to hijack your attention.
That is probably where recalibration starts. Not with someone else’s curated outside, but with your own unedited inside.
Turns out the first agent worth getting back online is your own mind.
