The internet never felt exactly safe, but it did used to feel like freedom. A wild, unstructured frontier. A portal you stepped through to escape family, teachers, and society, diving headfirst into a chaotic unknown. This was before Silicon Valley had perfected the algorithms, before influencers commodified authenticity, before activism became a performance and your identity became data to harvest.
Now the digital world feels heavy. Notifications pull you from your body, urging you to document life instead of living it. You scroll through a sanitized landscape, endlessly policing your own thoughts, shadowboxing with invisible algorithms. Celebrity culture metastasized, influencer campaigns turned your insecurities into profit, and now your inner life is just another marketplace.
You don’t want to delete yourself. This is our reality now. But you can still feel the psychic toll every day of your life. Every moment online carries the weight of surveillance, commodification, and division. You miss the person you were before you started watching yourself through a screen, before freedom turned into a cage.
There is a deeper ache beneath your exhaustion. It calls you back to yourself. Listen closely.
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