Beyond the algorithm

There's something quite nostalgic and hazy about reflecting on your childhood, when you're well into your fourth decade of life.

It's easy to forget all the complexity and defer to images of running with wild abandon in fields, building dens and rarely checking in with parents throughout entire expanses of the weekend.

It seems so alien to my children that they often start sentences with phrases like "Mum, you know the olden days....when you were a child.."

Of course, we're not here to solidify sepia images and claim there aren't benefits to exponential advancement in tech, though I do remember a time when the closest thing to the concept of 'on demand' was circling a biro around the preferred TV listings (of the four channels available) in a well-worn copy of my parents' Radio Times.

The 'always on' society we live in, and its deeply embedded algorithm, serves up constant personalised helpings of content that we lose all grasp of breadth. Bias is reiterated until it's so invisible, our opinions reverberate in echo chambers and we see only what we see.

This perpetual stream of information can feel so honed to our preferences that we become lazy and sated from consuming what we want, exactly when we want it. It's like a bottomless brunch, that looks enticing, but eventually prompts nausea and aversion.

This relentless consumerism is in many ways unpalatable, because it feeds on lack and the thing with lack is it has no boundaries. It's the perfect mechanism for a population seeped in 'not enough' conditioning, because it perpetuates the model. Pretty cunning, huh?

There was lack in the 80s and 90s too.

But we made do with patiently waiting for Bruno Brookes to do the weekly Top 40 run-down as we were poised to press 'record' on our cassette players. Sundays were long and empty. Shops were closed and town centres were void of pedestrians for the day. We ached for activity, we sat staring out of windows and we felt the pull of boredom.

Boredom is a rarity nowadays. As soon as it arises, the body's reflex is to reach for a digital device. This is the age of distraction. There's no room to sit with reality when we can fall into a vortex of curated tiles and endless looping video content.

And we wonder why our cognitive function is frenetic and disordered?

I'm not immune. I fall into social media abysses and convince myself that highly edited accounts of other people's lives are real. The filters are compelling.

So what's the antidote?

Maybe we'll hurtle so fast into a society scaffolded by AI that we'll barely be able to distinguish real from engineered? Or maybe this pace of acceleration will prompt an aversion (the nausea of the post-bottomless brunch) and a return to a more natural way of being?

Perhaps it's an invitation to broaden our perspective. See beyond the algorithm and question the unrelenting investment in the narrative. We can opt out of on demand and create space.

Space for contemplation and curiosity. We can daydream.

Hell, we can even be bored.

To create space for reflection & contemplation, contact me for more information on my innate wellbeing 1-1 coaching service.