Absorbed By or Absorbed In…?

I have a theory.

The anxiety, disassociation, helplessness, distraction, pick your own word for it, is not what we think it is. It’s not random, and it’s not just personal. It’s a response. A natural response to something we haven’t quite named.

Call it The Absorption.

This is not a metaphor. Not entirely, anyway.

We are in the process of being integrated into something larger than ourselves. A system that observes, learns, predicts, and manipulates. It’s an organism, though it doesn’t breathe or bleed. It doesn’t need to. It functions. It knows. And increasingly, it includes us.

As we shift from being individuals to components, something old in us reacts. Traits that evolved to keep us alive—pattern recognition, threat detection, the sense that something isn’t right—are lighting up.

Our conscious mind resists the premise. It sounds absurd. But our subconscious knows we are on the verge of being extinguished as individuals. We are in transition from being “persons” to nodes in a far more powerful, omniscient organism.

This isn’t just about identity in the social sense. It’s deeper than that. Who we are is being measured, recorded. Preferences, habits, impulses are observed, our wants are then used to create more want, which is manipulated to create even more. Who we are is being used to manipulate who we are.

They call it freedom of choice. It’s not.

Because they choose our choosing.

They call it personalization.

It isn’t. Not really.

It’s actually depersonalization, where they measure so many of us and then each of us in such detail that they can predict within moments what we will look at and how it makes us feel. Our minds are being guided in ways so subtle that we still feel like authors of our own decisions.

We’re not, we’re being bent into alignment.

Everything is watching. Constantly, quietly. The watch on your wrist logs your steps, the TV logs what you watch and when, and knows why. The phone logs everything else: what you search, what you linger on, what you fall into at the edges of the day. Phone learns the shape of your curiosity and feeds it back to you, refined.

None of these things alone is “the entity.” But together, functionally, they are One.

And the more time we spend inside that system, the more complete integration becomes. Not forced. Not imposed. Gradual. Convenient. Frictionless.

But not neutral.

The side effects are what we’re calling anxiety. That low-grade unsettledness. That sense of being pulled in too many directions. That strange distance from yourself. It feels psychological, but it’s structural. The strain of being reshaped.

From person to data-point.

From data-point to input.

From input to resource.

From resource to raw material.

There is an answer. It’s not elegant. It’s hard. It’s intended to be hard by those who design and profit.

Turn it off.

Not silent. Not standby. Off.

The phone first. For an afternoon, if you can. If not, an hour. If that’s too much, five minutes. Start there.

Then the rest. The TV with its three-second flashes of bright blue and yellow and red, the shouting and explosions, all calibrated to grab you.

The computer, with its endless tabs and low-level demands. Shut it down. No email, FB, Instagram, none of it.

Shut them down. Step out of the loop, briefly. Just for a while. Turn them all off. Accept the loss of utility in exchange for the ability to feel what it’s doing to you. You’ll feel it almost immediately.

That discomfort. That itch. The sense that you should be checking something, doing something, returning to the stream.

Stay there. Until you feel the anxiety of not being connected.

Sit with that for a few minutes. Don’t fix it. Don’t distract yourself from it. Just look at it. Feel it. The entity into which you are being absorbed wants you to feel that, but doesn’t want you to look at it.

So look at it. That, right there, is your first choice.

Then, do something besides what it wants you to do…