Articles 19.

19.1 **

Love in the Age of TikTok - Maria Katrina Cortez

The bed is empty, but my screen hums. Night after night, I scroll—half-dazed, half-hypnotised—through an endless stream of Instagram reels. My phone, ever-vigilant, distills my thoughts into an algorithm, feeding me a steady diet of avoidant attachment, situationships, red flags, and the ever-expanding lexicon of modern love’s dysfunctions.

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We often lay the blame at the feet of the sexual revolution. But if young conservatives are consciously and sometimes even loudly critical of the legacy of the long ’60s, and yet are still affected by the shifting sands of modern love, could there be something more amiss? We may be overlooking even stronger forces that have conspired to destroy romantic relationships, the sanctity of marriage, and the role of family as a pillar of stability as they were upheld before modern disruptions. The invisible forces governing our era insidiously influence young minds—regardless of their convictions.

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One crucial critique is missing from the debate on our post-capitalist tech market: we rarely consider how the brevity and relentless form of social media itself might be warping our ability to love. Regardless of political or religious affiliation, a generation of twenty- and thirty-year-olds devotes hours to scrolling through Reels every day and is unaware of their psychological effects. What once seemed the exclusive domain of TikTok and Instagram has also colonised Facebook and YouTube, transforming them into sprawling archives of bite-sized distractions.

McLuhan distinguishes between hot and cool media, with “hot” referring to those which require little participation and “cool” those that require more input from us. Here, the “hot” media of online reels, provides a high-definition, immersive experience that demands minimal intellectual or emotional participation from viewers. Such reels overwhelm the senses, leaving little room for interpretation. Cool media, by contrast—such as phone conversations—require greater personal involvement, inviting audiences to actively fill in gaps and engage.

Yet Reels has shifted this balance. The rapid-fire, short-form structure demands a different kind of engagement, drawing viewers into an almost reflexive rhythm of scrolling and reacting. While this may foster momentary bursts of attention, it comes at the cost of sustained focus. The fleeting, fragmented nature of these interactions undermines our capacity for more reflective thought.

McLuhan’s theory illuminates the paradox: these platforms overwhelm us with relentless immediacy, eroding the space required for thoughtful interaction. This torrent of reels may seem trivial at first glance, but its broader implications for how we connect—with ideas and with each other—strike a deep terror.

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If our brain patterns are rewired—our very biology altered—by constant digital inputs, we become increasingly vulnerable to forces that undermine long-term commitment. As dopamine cycles erode our capacity for sustained focus, even our deepest values may falter under the weight of unrelenting, ephemeral stimuli. The pull of instant gratification becomes a formidable adversary to marriage itself, weakening our devotion to a sacred institution built on perseverance.

19.2

For The Reader Who Doesn’t Read - Elif Shafak

“‘So much is happening in the world today that I don’t have time to read fiction. I need to focus on more important things—politics, finance, technology, the AI Revolution... you know, urgent stuff. No time for novels.’

I have heard such things before. Whoever says “I don’t have time for novels” is basically saying “I don’t have time for imagination. I don’t have time for empathy. I don’t have time for my own feelings.

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It is rather unfortunate that the word ‘fiction’ in the English language is at times understood and employed as the opposite of ‘fact’.

The etymology of the word takes us back to Latin fictionem, meaning ‘fashioning or feigning or inventing.’ If we follow this path we might end up thinking that fiction has nothing to do with reality.

This gives the impression that novels are meant to be read whenever we seek a break from this world and its myriad challenges—an escape into a fabricated and figmental universe that bears little, if any, resemblance to our own.

But the magic of literature lies precisely in its ability to blend the near and the far, the possible and the impossible, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the real and the surreal, the self and the Other, the past and the present, the present and the future in such a radical yet organic way that it dismantles and surpasses all such dualities.

To put it more bluntly, fiction brings us closer to the truth.

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There is a second etymology of the word ‘fiction’—one that remains largely forgotten. It traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root dheigh, which means “to shape from liquid to solid,” “to knead like dough,” or “to form out of clay.”

I like that meaning better.

Like kneading bread, distilling water, tending a garden, fiction is as urgent and essential for our survival in this world—the real world.”

19.3***

Nobody Has A Personality Anymore - Freya India

Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.

In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us, until nobody is normal. Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people. Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.

We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent. Now our clumsy mothers have always had undiagnosed ADHD; our quiet dads don’t realise they are autistic; our stoic grandfathers are emotionally stunted. We even helpfully diagnose the dead. And I think this is why people get so defensive of these diagnoses, so insistent that they explain everything. They are trying to hold onto themselves; every piece of their personality is contained within them.

And it’s not only personality traits we have lost. There are no experiences anymore, no phases or seasons of life, no wonders or mysteries, only clues about what could be wrong with us. Everything that happens can be explained away; nothing is exempt. We can’t accept that we love someone, madly and illogically; no, the enlightened way to think is to see through that, get down to what is really going on, find the hidden motives. Who we fall for is nothing but a trauma response. “You don’t have a crush; you have attachment issues”. Maybe he reminds you of an early caregiver who wounded you. In fact there are no feelings at all anymore; only dysregulated nervous systems. Every human experience we have is evidence, and the purpose of our lives is to piece it all perfectly together. This is the healthy way to think, that previous generations were so cruelly deprived of.

I’m not sure I believe this anymore. That we are more enlightened now than in the past, more emotionally intelligent. My grandma is a grandma, a mother, a wife; we are attachment disorders. She is selfless and takes things to heart; we have rejection sensitive dysphoria and fawn as a trauma response. They are souls; we are symptoms. Of course there were people in the past who needed real help and never received any sort of understanding, but that is not the full story; many were also happier, less self-conscious, actually able to forget themselves. I asked my grandparents who have been married for six decades why they chose each other and got a clumsy answer. They had never really thought about it. Maybe I am too nostalgic about the past, but there is something there that has been lost, that in that moment I struggled to relate to, a simpler way of living. And an arrogance to us now, seeing people in the past as incomplete and unsolved, when we are this anxious and confused.

I think this is why my generation gets stuck on things like relationships and parenthood. The commitments we stumble over, the decisions we endlessly debate, the traditions we find hard to hold onto, are often the ones we can’t easily explain. We are trying to explain the inexplicable. It’s hard to defend romantic love against staying single because it isn’t safe or controllable or particularly rational. The same with having children. Put these things in a pro-con list and they stop making logical sense. They cannot be calculated or codified. Ask older generations why they started families. Often they didn’t really think it through. And maybe that isn’t as crazy as we have been led to believe, maybe that isn’t so reckless, maybe there’s something human in that.

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Because we can’t ever explain everything. At some point we have to stop analysing and seeing through things and accept the unknowable. All we can ever really achieve is faith. Some humour at ourselves, too. It’s impossible to heal from being human, and this is why the mental health industry has infinite demand. Explain anything long enough and you will find a pathology; dig deep enough you will disappear.

We keep being told that the bravest thing now is to do the work. But I think it takes courage not to explain everything, to release control, to resist that impulse to turn inwards. And wisdom too, to accept that we will never understand ourselves through anything other than how we act, how we live, and how we treat other people. We are thinking about ourselves enough. We don’t need more awareness or answers. My worry is that after a lifetime spent trying to explain themselves, solve their strong feelings, standardise their personalities, and make sense of every experience, a generation might realise that the only problem they had, all along, was being human.

So free yourself to experience, not explain. Be brave enough to be normal. Do not offer up your feelings and decisions and memories to the intrusion of the market, to the interpretation of experts, to be filed as deviations from what the medical industry decides is healthy. Leave yourself unsolved. Who knows; it’s a mystery. Written in the stars. From somewhere unknown. Holding on to your personality is a declaration that you are human. A person, not a product. No other explanation needed.

19.4

Compression Culture Is Making You Stupid & Uninteresting - Maalvika

“We've created a culture that treats depth like inefficiency. One that wants love without awkwardness, wisdom without confusion, transformation without the growing pains that crack us open and rebuild us from the inside out. And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not knowing, the generative power of sitting with difficulty, the transformative potential of things that resist compression.

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But somewhere along the way, perhaps with the rise of industrial efficiency, perhaps with the commodification of education, perhaps with the acceleration of information capitalism, we began to mistake information for knowledge, and knowledge for wisdom. We began to believe that the value of an experience could be separated from the experience itself, that the essence of things could be extracted and consumed like vitamins, leaving the rest behind as waste.

This compression culture doesn't just change how we think, but I argue it changes what we expect from every aspect of human experience! We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can always be whittled down, that difficulty can always be optimized away, that transformation should be instant and effortless.

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We want the wisdom without the patient work of becoming wise.

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The things that matter most — love, wisdom, skill, character — resist compression for the same reason great literature does. They exist in their full particularity, in the accumulation of small moments, in the patient repetition that looks like nothing from the outside but is everything on the inside. The athlete knows that strength comes from the ten-thousandth repetition, not the first. The parent knows that trust builds through bedtime stories read with the same enthusiasm for the hundredth time. The artist knows that mastery emerges from the willingness to fail beautifully, repeatedly, until failure teaches you something failure alone can teach.

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Once a week, someone breathlessly tells me, "Oh my god, I read this article that said..." But what they mean is they watched a 30-second TikTok or skimmed a headline while scrolling through their feed. They think they've "read" something when they've consumed the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: all sugar, no substance, dissolving the moment it hits their tongue. They're gorging themselves on clickbait headlines designed to trigger, not inform… each one a perfect little lie that promises understanding while delivering only the emotional rush of feeling informed.

I think this can be worse than ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge coupled with the confidence that comes from thinking you understand something you've never actually encountered. These people walk around armed with headlines masquerading as insights, ready to deploy half-digested talking points in conversations that require actual thought. They've become human echo chambers, amplifying signals they never bothered to decode.

The tragedy isn't that they don't know things. No. It's that they don't know they don't know things. Compression culture has trained them to mistake the map for the territory, the summary for the experience, the headline for the whole damn story.

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Compression culture rewires your body, too. Not just your brain. Notice how you read now: shoulders hunched like a predator ready to pounce on the next piece of information, breath shallow and rapid as if oxygen itself were scarce, eyes darting frantically across screens like a rat in a maze searching for the cheese of instant gratification. Your nervous system lives in a constant state of low-grade panic, flooded with cortisol, always seeking the next summary, the next shortcut, the next escape from the discomfort of not knowing.”

19.5**

On Vigilance - Catherine Shannon

“There’s one glaring exception to this hyper-vigilance: what I read online. To be clear, I try quite hard to completely avoid the darkest corners of the internet: pornography, violence, true crime, death, various manifestos. I think I’ve muted over 140 words on X/Twitter and I’m quick to unfollow, mute, and block. It’s possible, though not always easy or foolproof, to insulate yourself from the torrent of online horrors. (It’s a worthwhile endeavor, as it’s possible to read what would be a lifetime’s worth of bad news in a single morning scroll.) But lately I’ve been trying to protect myself from things that are much more innocent: garden variety viral content, parasocial podcasts, ear worms, trite turns of phrase

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Everything seems like a catastrophe when everything we see online either is one (or is made to seem like one). Recently, I have had to force myself to lower the stakes, slow down, and ask myself, “Is this something I genuinely think, or is this just something I’ve heard before?” Things aren’t true just because they are repeated at scale. It’s frightening how easily the thoughts of others can masquerade as one’s own.

In our therapeutic world, so much of what we consume is reductive and generalized. It tries to explain how we feel while knowing nothing about us, finding problems where there are none, and offering solutions to problems that were invented in the first place. The mind sometimes needs to wrestle with things on its own. This isn’t about putting your head in the sand; it’s allowing yourself the space for genuine self-reflection and solitude, where the worst case scenario is rarely the current reality.

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It is not cowardly to protect yourself. Quite the opposite, in fact. The real question is: Why would you willingly subject yourself to this kind of stuff? Viral online discourse is, broadly speaking, a constant psychic attack. Nine times out of ten it is manipulative, bought and paid for, negative, exaggerated, hysterical, or cynical. Besides, sometimes people just lie. All of this wears you down, breaks your will, and replaces your thoughts with those of others. It leads to sudden irrational fears, intrusive thoughts, or just plain exhaustion. The algorithm won’t provide you with satisfying answers to your unique situation; it is designed to keep you in a state of anxiety and doubt. The way you get to satisfying answers is by seeking truth. In my experience, this is most easily done by getting away from the message boards and algorithms, living in the world, reading, journaling, and having hours-long conversations with the people you love.

We need to be careful about what we consume, even the seemingly innocent things. This is because what we consume, we internalize to some degree. Your consumption undoubtedly has an effect on your sense of yourself, but even more concerning, it affects your imagination, which in turn affects the direction your life will take. We shouldn’t confuse broad exposure with depth, or information with wisdom. If you throw caution to the wind, you will inevitably find yourself blown about in every direction. You’ll find yourself living in a random city, wearing clothes someone else thinks are cool, with a head full of thoughts that are not your own.”

19.6 ***

The Insincerity of Therapy - Speak - Freya India

“Freya India: Ayishat, you recently wrote a thoughtful piece called The Offensiveness of Group Speak, about the conformity of our language. One of the examples you give is the rise of therapy buzzwords like trauma, toxic and gaslighting. I’ve written a lot about this too. I’m very sceptical of therapy-speak, unconvinced it even helps us open up. More often I think it actually closes down our ability to have honest conversations.

But you got to the heart of what bothers me about it, the insincerity. If someone tells me about their “fearful-avoidant” attachment style or how they are learning to “hold space” for others, I find it hard to feel anything. But if they tell me about their hurt and heartbreak, or how they are trying to be less selfish, I’m listening. We are talking human to human now.

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Therapy-speak has become what luxury brands are to fashion, a way to signal refinement. It’s meant to suggest you’re doing the work, that you’re emotionally literate, even when the words themselves say very little.

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There’s no way of saying this without sounding cringeworthy, but I also feel you can sense when someone has suffered, sincerely suffered. Not always, but a lot of the time. In my experience they tend to have more grace, and an understanding that each of us is suffering in our own way.

The way I see it, therapy culture increasingly insists that suffering only counts if it comes with a label. If you’re neurotypical, or don’t have a diagnosis, you can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be misunderstood, in pain, or an outcast.

I’ve been following you for a long time and I feel like this has been a theme of your thinking over the years, this hoarding of suffering. You once wrote, “The foundation of a lot of conflict seems to be the inability to say, ‘we are both uniquely struggling’ instead people want to claim a monopoly on suffering.” You have said that suffering isn’t a contest, that trauma isn’t a tournament. As you put it, “It’s clear that suffering is written into the small print

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Kingsnorth is pointing to something that feels increasingly clear. The world is dark, in part, because we are blind to the consequences of our own thinking and beliefs. Much of human behaviour is shaped by how we face jealousy, anger, grief, regret, heartbreak, our limitations, and the truth itself. Anything that dulls our ability to face these realities I regard with suspicion. And when thought terminating habits become widespread and celebrated, I find it impossible to remain a silent witness.

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This has been a theme of my own writing. I really feel that young people are starved for wisdom today, and disoriented without it. The tragedy of all these woke and anti-woke commentators maximising clicks and monetising outrage is that they are often all we have left. So many young people are growing up without stable families, without religious figures, without neighbours they regularly interact with, without anyone who really knows and can guide them. For many the most consistent voices in their lives are podcast hosts.

I’ve argued before that these are not real communities, and got some backlash for it. But it breaks my heart to see so many young people defending simulations, not realising that they are putting up with replacements of what previous generations once had. Maybe they numb our loneliness for a while, but they are nothing like an actual community. Many of us wouldn’t know that, though. We have never had places that feel familiar, that we could return to again and again, where we are known and heard. Only on our screens.

I’ve had young men tell me that without the internet they would have no role models at all. Young women tell me they would have no friends. I find that depressing, that this is where we are now. And my worry is that instead of facing the root problems, fatherlessness, for example, we focus on improving our simulations. We try to make the podcasts and forums and Instagram communities and AI chatbots better, more accessible, more realistic, forgetting that they were always substitutes, built on bad incentives.

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Goodness! I’ve never heard someone articulate so much of what I think with such precision. I too notice the dearth of wisdom and the erosion of integrity in the otherwise intelligent. But I've come to realise, painfully, that integrity and wisdom aren’t by-products of intellect or education. They’re born of self-honesty and an internal grounding. If anything, intellect can make self-deception easier, offering more elaborate ways to lie to yourself.

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I once followed a woman on Twitter who stood out because she was deeply wise. She never weighed in on current affairs, yet somehow illuminated the state of things more clearly than any political pundit. She seemed too self-inquisitive to be on Twitter. A little too honest with herself not to recognise the questionable reasons she used that app daily. Then, after years of posting and building an audience of tens of thousands, she deleted her account. Even though it was unsurprising, her sudden departure made me emotional. It confirmed what I knew on a gut level. By then, we had exchanged numbers, so I asked her why she left. Her reply: “social media is heroin for existential loneliness”

I’ve never stopped thinking about that. Since then, I've noticed that everyone I regard as having wisdom or integrity has either deleted their account or uses it very sparingly. If wisdom is self-honesty, you can’t lie to yourself about what an addiction is taking from you, no matter its perks. And if you want to live with integrity, at some point you have to act on that knowledge.