Every morning, I wake up with a phone pressed to my face like a cold confession booth, demanding repentance before I've even sinned. I'm old school compared to most, so first I check my emails, then my texts - but even I can't resist graduating on to a sneak peek at my notifications.  WhatsApp messages, Facebook likes, X shares, all of them are dopamine’s little electric kisses - because I need proof that I exist.

Before coffee fully revives my bleary consciousness, before I become a woman with a body, bills and memories of encounters I probably shouldn’t have had, I'm a digital corpse who requires resurrection by likes. In the gospel according to Instagram, he who is seen is saved.

We've built a cult of screens and offered ourselves up as the sacrifice. We think the gods of technology will bless us with love and immortality. Instead, we get chronic anxiety, failing eyesight, a numbness to reality, and a pixelated simulacrum of connection that looks nothing like real intimacy.

"We wore masks until they cracked. Now we call it art."

There's no room for originality in our economy of attention, only replication. We are taught to regurgitate trending audio clips, to mimic the influencer’s curated kitchen.  We adopt the political discourse that guarantees us social safety. We do all of this instinctively because we know that deviation is punished, just like it was in high school and has been all throughout history.

It wasn’t always this way. Art used to be rebellion, poetry was a bloodletting, and music, music was a protest, or maybe sometimes a prayer. Now it’s an algorithmic echo chamber. Your content gets shadow-banned if you’re too raw. Your existence gets shadow-banned if you’re too real.

Addiction by Design: No One is Free

It is no accident that you can’t stop scrolling. Your addiction was engineered by men who wanted to build a dopamine slot machine and sell your attention to the highest bidder. It is a digital meth lab with sterile branding. The icons are bright, the notifications drip-fed. The infinite scroll on your feed has been designed to override your natural sense of satiety. You're the lab rat pressing the lever, begging for food that never comes, running on a treadmill of illusion, while calling it connection.

None of us escape this. Not the academic who tweets her theories to a phantom classroom, nor the fitness girl posting her shredded abs with a caption about self-love to mask the bulimia beneath. Even the passionately political dude ranting about capitalism is mining his own trauma for content. 

Nihilism is monetised now. Your rage is data-mined for advertisers delectation. Every post is a sale, every confession conversion copy for a future sponsor.

We are not people anymore. We've morphed into avatars with flesh attachments.

Oversharing: Confessions to Nowhere

People call it vulnerability. I call it tactical confession. Our feeds are confessional booths with no priest because there's no absolution here , only echoes of our own desperation to be seen. We share our sexual trauma for likes. We post our mental breakdowns as aesthetic reels with text overlays proclaiming “healing is not linear”. 

There is no healing happening anywhere, only performance. We're doing all of this because somewhere along the line, oversharing became the cheapest way to buy attention.

"Performance is the new confession."

When I read Joan Didion, I'm struck by her detached incision. Her pain's laid out forensically, with the distance of a journalist and the heartbreak of a mother writing her child’s obituary.Then  I read David Foster Wallace and I'm struck by the ADHD-style hyper-consciousness of his prose, the gnawing analysis of every twitch of culture.  The suffocating sense of being trapped inside your own mind. 

Both of them wrote about despair with a precision and artistry that made it bearable to witness. Now, people just curate their pain for public consumption, editing out the jagged edges to fit a palatable narrative. Trauma must be SEO-friendly. Grief needs to be an engagement funnel. If you're not careful, you'll find yourself writing about the worst trauma of your life in bullet points, just to optimise your LinkedIn algorithm. This is not healing. This is how we die.

Authenticity is Dead, Long Live the Algorithm

Original thought has become an endangered species. We used to create art because we couldn’t bear not to. Now we create content because we can’t bear to disappear. We don't write books that bleed anymore, instead we write captions with strategic hashtags. We don't paint because the madness demands it, we design carousels that convert. 

We think we're free because we can say anything, but everything we say is shaped by what will trend - or not get us  de-platformed or demonetised. We're not brave. We're brand-safe rebels with sponsored rage.

The internet's littered with people screaming into the void about their uniqueness while using the same templates, phrases -  and now AI tools - that promise them they can stand out. There's no marketplace for originality, only replicas trend now.

"Originality died the moment we hit publish."

We're collectively dying of oversharing and performance. Mystery has fled the building and there's no space for silence. Art must be optimised for engagement. We've traded in authenticity for relevance, swapped out creativity for virality.  Privacy has been sold down the river for performative vulnerability. 

 The worst thing is about all of this is that none of us  know how to end it. Then again, in today's environment, within the continuous scream of social static, I truly think we have lost the ability to end anything. We'll probably just keep scrolling forever.

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