the feed knows when my breath changes. it knows the second my thumb hesitates over an image, how long my pupils stay dilated at a certain color, at a certain face. it collects my hunger like an archivist, cataloguing what i will want before i want it. it mistakes this for knowing me. and sometimes i make the same mistake.

the for you page is a mirror that reflects nothing warm. it is a perfect listener with no mouth. it gives me everything except the thing i am looking for.

everyone i know is lonely. everyone i don’t know, too.

but our loneliness is dressed differently now. it no longer sits in empty rooms or at the edge of a crowded party. it lives here, in the infinite scroll, where we can be almost understood, almost touched, almost known. it is a loneliness that never has to break, because we continue to feed it.

there are days i wish the algorithm would make a mistake. give me something ugly, something irrelevant, something it thinks i would hate. maybe then i would feel the pleasure of refusing it. maybe then i could know where it ends and where i begin.

being known by an algorithm is like being loved by someone who only knows your habits. they can make your coffee, but they will never ask why you drink it. they will never ask you how your day was or why you sleep on the right side of the bed, not the left.

i dream of taking my loneliness out of its cage and letting it run wild until it collapses. i imagine it gulping the air of a field, spilling itself into the dirt and forgetting my name. but instead i feed it the same way i always have. with the soundless applause of strangers who have mistaken me for someone else.

we are starved for connection, but we ration the real thing. instead we live in a simulation of intimacy: people we will never meet nodding along to our pain, strangers performing joy in a way that makes us believe we could borrow it, opinions sharpened not for truth but for applause. and then, when the applause ends, we return to the feed for validation and a pseudo sense of community knowing it will never be able to replace the real thing.

but the feed cannot hold you. it can only mimic the shape of a hand.

if you want to be known, you have to free yourself from the screen. take your hunger elsewhere. into a room where music is being made for no audience. a flicker of ecstasy. into a book that does not care if you finish it. a quiet escape. into a painting that is speaking a language you do not speak. you understand. into the eyes of someone who looks back. and suddenly you’re home.

the loneliest place in the world is your for you page. and the only way out is to make something it could never predict.

the anatomy of algorithmic loneliness

loneliness used to have a shape. a long table set for more people to arrive. the quiet walk home after a night where you laughed but felt yourself from the outside. the absence of a letter and the silence after the phone rings once it stops.

now loneliness is vapor. it drifts through the constant presence of others, faceless but endlessly available. we don’t wait for the letter anymore, we refresh the feed. someone, somewhere, is speaking. someone is moving their mouth toward a microphone, tilting their face toward the light. someone is telling me exactly how to think about the thing i haven’t thought of. a kidnapping of the mind.

the loneliness in this is harder to point to because it’s layered with the simulation of company. the feed is never blank, so we convince ourselves we aren’t alone. there’s always another face, another voice, another stranger building a sentence just for me. but they aren’t building it for me.

i play along. i accept the comfort of recognition even when it leaves me emptier. there is safety in knowing that nothing i see will ask anything from me. i will not have to explain myself. i will not have to endure the long and uncertain work of being truly known.

safety is the cage.

real connection is messy. it misreads you. it interrupts you. it tells you the wrong story and then asks you to listen again. it is the friction of two separate lives trying to align. the chaos of an argument and the duality of humans. the intimacy of disagreement.

the masochism of the scroll

i know what the feed is doing to me, and i return anyway. there’s a sweetness in the ache it leaves behind. i scroll the way you press your tongue against a loose tooth. to feel the pain, and measure it. to prove it’s still there.

the feed makes my loneliness easy to carry. it turns it into something ornamental. a pet i can feed without leaving the bed. i stroke it with the touch of my finger and keep it warm in my palm. i let it grow without ever letting it roam.

sometimes i think my loneliness pet enjoys this arrangement. it has no predators here. it doesn’t have to fight for its life in the wild of real conversation where someone might misunderstand it or fail to care. here, it is cultivated and kept alive in perfect, temperature-controlled captivity.

off-screen desire

sometimes i think the greatest seduction of the feed is not that it knows me, but that it never challenges me to know anyone else.

because if you want to be known, you have to risk stepping into the world that can wound you.

what we’re craving isn’t more content, it’s the shock of contact. the heat of another mind meeting ours without the glass between us. a slow recognition that builds when you sit across from someone and watch their expression change and shift in their seat. contact with a human that doesn’t turn our thoughts into tv static or the blurry eyed haze that fogs our vision after hours of staring into the eyes of the computer.

take your hunger there.

take it to a person. not to perform your loneliness for them, but to share it and let it dissolve a little in their presence.

the things that will save us from this chronic, quiet hunger are the things that can never be reduced to an algorithm: the smell of a storm through an open window. the off-key voice of someone singing in the kitchen. the conversation that goes somewhere neither of you expected.

return and release

the feed will still be there tomorrow, watching and listening, ready to give me exactly what i didn’t have the courage to ask for out loud.

it will keep learning the rhythm of my pauses, the angle of my gaze, the way i hover over a face that reminds me of someone i’ve lost. it will keep building the ghost of me it thinks is enough.

but tonight i will let it hum in the dark without me.

i will give my hunger to a different room. one with bad lighting and voices talking over each other. i will place it in the spine of a book that smells faintly of dust. i will hand it to a song that feels a little broken and unfinished.

and when the feed tries to call me back, i will remind myself once again that its hands are made of glass. and glass cannot hold me.

the loneliest place in the world is your for you page. and the only way out is to love something that will never be archived.

this is the style of writing i usually keep in my notebook. more poetic and lyrical, more intimate, closer to the way my thoughts arrive. and tonight i wanted to share it with you.

i hope you enjoyed.

i love you.

bye.

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