VER-XIII-0045
“I let apps choose what I watch, eat, read, and even who I date.”
One recommendation at a time, you handed the steering to systems optimized for engagement, not for your life. It feels like ease. It is the slow erosion of the muscle that decides, and a self that never chooses slowly stops knowing what it wants. Take a few decisions back, by hand, on purpose.
Your Practice
- Pick one domain, meals, reading, music, and choose deliberately this week, no recommendations.
- Notice the small panic of an unguided choice. That's the atrophied muscle waking up.
- Ask of each algorithm: 'Is this optimized for me, or for my attention?' They're rarely the same.
- Keep a short list of things you chose yourself. Rebuild the evidence that you still can.
The Architects
“We must reserve a back shop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.”
Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book I, ch. 39 'Of Solitude' (ch. XXXVIII in Cotton's numbering); wording blends the Cotton and Florio/Frame renderings