On Broken Brains: Do I Have My Own Opinions Anymore?

My 30th Year Series #6: 'My sense of self is seeping into an algorithm, or the algorithm is seeping into my sense of self.'

Welcome to my sixth essay in my 30th year series (we’re half way through!). Every month this year, I’ll be dropping an essay on my journey out of my twenties and into my thirties. This will mostly be a free newsletter, each month, but any support is greatly appreciated - as it helps me do this (gestures to the Substack universe). I’m offering 10% off my annual subscription plan at the moment, grab it while it lasts.

I watch a TikTok telling me how I feel about a food I’ve never tried. I read an Instagram carousel informing me of a recent world horror and where to donate, and where to direct my anger at. I like a post on X on autopilot — even though I use a burner account for work now, as last summer I was trolled by fascists on there for four days straight — because I like the person and instinctively assume I’ll agree with what they’re saying. I’m not sure I read it properly. I’m not sure I read anything properly anymore. I read a few articles from the Guardian opinion page each morning, sometimes the New Yorker, too. I listen to two podcasts a day, one at the gym, one whilst I cook dinner. I have six on rotation, and know the hosts of two of them, and have a parasocial relationship with another two (friends of friends of friends). I have an app that tries to lock me out of my social media (an app I downloaded and programmed), which I ignore on average nine times a day. I have to wait five seconds before getting my notification-checking-fix. On Reddit, I look up what people have to say about the TV I watch, especially reality: Drag Race, The Valley, Real Housewives of SLC.

I work on social media for 20 hours a week, minimum. I use social media personally for another 10 or 15 hours each week, averaging 35 hours a week. The lines are blurred. About an hour each day of that is on WhatsApp, another hour on Slack. That’s more than a full day each week, lost to my phone. I am not unique, I am the rule: millennials typically spend around 6 hours and 42 minutes on screens daily, averaging 35.1 hours per week. I tell myself it’s work, and therefore I’m not doing as badly as most. I recently tried writing in a daily journal, another app on my phone, but retreated back to my Notes app. I have 3,942 notes. It’s where I put what I think are original thoughts, trying to hold on to them like a huffed-on dandelion. I rarely look back at them, and when I do, I cringe. I use a fitness app to log my exercise each day, so I can see my progress with weight lifting. My steps are counted on there, too. For work, sometimes I have to edit videos of Palestinian children being bombed, on an app called CapCut, that tries to make me upgrade to paid every ten minutes. It flashes adverts at me for candy-based games. I re-share stories about violent misogyny on Instagram. I open my DM requests and read nice messages from people who like my writing, before inevitably opening one from someone who does not.

I save TikTok videos detailing disordered eating, for a feature I’m writing. My friend shares something she found funny. I tell her it’s an AI video. She didn’t realise. I feel our reality slipping, but I don’t want to be a Luddite, so I try not to complain about it too much. I know social media is our reality now. More than one person I love is gendering ChatGPT. People I work with are using it to write me emails, and I can tell, and I feel bad because I wonder if I’m hard to communicate with, and that’s why they’re using it. I’ve used it a couple of times, mostly out of curiosity, and then I feel like a hypocrite. A lot of my work comes from people who follow me on Instagram, and so I feel that I can’t take a break from it, even when I need to. I tell myself I will, but then I miss something. small or big, it doesn’t matter.

But I miss something. And so, I can’t miss anything. Can I? Can any of us? It’s all about being there, there when it happens. So, my screen time is six hours a day on average and I feel constantly nauseous, like the world is going to end, like my world is going to end, like I’m one post away from success or rotten apples being thrown at me. And then, each night as I try and fail to sleep, I wonder why I’m so anxious. I wonder why my brain feels heavy with fog. I try and think about how I actually feel in therapy, but it’s cloudy, and my sense of self is seeping into an algorithm, or the algorithm is seeping into my sense of self.

And, breathe.

This is a look at the stream of thoughts I have when I try to think about why I feel like I don’t know what my own opinions are anymore, or what are the opinions of others that I’ve ingested via social media osmosis.

I’m obviously not alone in these feelings. Jia Tolentino has been one of my favourite writers this past decade, and a recent piece in The New Yorker (that I’m sure you’ve all read by now, given that it went viral), called My Brain Finally Broke, solidified this love. Much of it echoed my recent internal monologue. In it, she writes:

“Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. Fake words creeping like kudzu into scientific papers and dating profiles and e-mails and text messages and news outlets and social feeds and job listings and job applications. Fake entities standing guard over chat boxes when we try to dispute a medical bill, waiting sphinxlike for us to crack the code that allows us to talk to a human. The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality—first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.”

What this environment has resulted in is a tangled web of self-doubt and questioning. I write opinion pieces for publications on a weekly basis, and when I do so, I try and interrogate what my actual thoughts are. I try not to get tangled up in ‘discourse’ and what the cool, popular opinion is. I try and do independent research, to sit and think about things alone. I do this, and sometimes I fail. It’s a vicious cycle. If one of these pieces goes viral, my opinions and thoughts are often regurgitated by someone else, for a different publication, with a slightly different headline. I feel no ownership or anger over this anymore — we are all goldfish swimming in circles around each other. I am conscious to never do this myself, but it’s hard to tell if I even have any opinions of my own anyway.

We are living in an online plane where our opinions bleed into one another’s at such a fast rate that no one is actually given enough time to think. We are reacting, not thinking. We are thoughtlessly enraged, thoughtlessly empowered, thoughtlessly engulfed.

It reminds me of the Fleabag monologue:

“I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning. No, I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to…tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that’s why people want someone like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it. You just tell them what to do and what they’ll get out of the end of it, even though I don’t believe your bullshit and I know that scientifically nothing that I do makes any difference in the end, anyway, I’m still scared. Why am I still scared? So just tell me what to do. Just fucking tell me what to do, Father.”

Except, whilst I used to relate heavily to this bit of writing, I now feel and want the total opposite. I don’t want someone to tell me what to like and what to hate. I want to tell myself what to like and what to hate.

I have no answers. A worldwide social media ban where we all get 20 minutes a day online and that’s it? Until we can all be trusted to form our personalities around how we feel again — not what content creators on TikTok prescribe we feel. In lieu of that, we need to all be more responsible, and consume consciously.

Personally, it looks like trying to spend two days offline at the weekends if I’m not working. I am failing at this, naturally. But I will keep trying. And I want to talk about it more. How this new existence is not working for me, how not knowing where I end and the algorithm starts is entrapping me in an anxiety where I am hyper-alert, vigilant, introspective. I don’t want someone (a teen from midwest America that I’ve never met) to tell me what to wear in the mornings. I want to get dressed how I used to — based on feeling. Influenced by magazines, sure. But that was just influence. What’s happening now is a domination.

SORRY THIS IS THE MOST CHAOTIC ESSAY I’VE EVER WRITTEN. If you made it to the end, I appreciate you.