The internet makes you feel less human. That's the most honest sentence I can write today.
Online you're not a person. You're a number. You're a follower count. You're a like. You're a retention metric. You're a view. You're a watch time. You're a tap on a card. You're a row in somebody's analytics dashboard. Strip away the avatar and the bio and the carefully curated grid and that's what you are to the platform and to most of the people scrolling past you. A data point. With no soul. With no story. With no name they'll remember tomorrow.
And it warps you. Cause when you spend hours a day inside that system you start to feel like a number too. You start measuring yourself the same way. By the engagement. By the followers. By the people who liked the last post and the people who didn't. By who viewed the story and who didn't. By who replied and who left you on read. You become a stat in your own life. You start grading yourself with the same metrics the algorithm grades you with. And those metrics don't care about you. They never did.
Then you walk into a corner store in your neighborhood. The dude behind the counter looks up and says what's up. Asks how your day's going. Slides the receipt across. Tells you to take it easy. Just a normal exchange. Three seconds. Nothing crazy.
And it hits different. Cause for those three seconds you weren't a metric. You were a person. He saw you. He acknowledged you. He didn't need you to be at a certain follower count for it to count. He didn't check your engagement before saying hi. He just said hi. Because you walked in. Because you exist. Because that's what humans do when they share a room.
That's what we used to have all the time. That's what's been quietly draining away the more our lives moved online. The default state of being human used to be: you walk through your day and people see you. The cashier. The mailman. The neighbor on the porch. The barista. The dog walker. Everybody nodding at everybody in some loose net of mutual acknowledgment. None of it was deep. But all of it was real. All of it kept reminding you that you exist to other humans, not just to a feed.
Now the default state is: you sit in your room and you measure yourself against a billion strangers and lose. Every single time. Cause somebody is always doing better. Somebody is always louder. Somebody is always getting more numbers. And you are always smaller in the comparison than you are in real life.
This is why getting off social media even a little bit is good for you. Not all of it. I'm not preaching the full digital detox monk life. I'm on it too. I know. But spending less time in there. Spending more time in the world where you're a person by default and not a number by default. That actually matters for your nervous system.
Cause the internet has a tier system. You either get popular or you get forgotten. There's no middle. You're either a name people know or you're noise in the feed. And most of us are noise. That's just math. There's billions of us and only so many slots at the top. The internet will not remember you unless you crack the algorithm in a way 99.9% of people will not. That's reality.
But your neighborhood will remember you. The dude at the deli will remember you. The girl at the coffee shop you go to every Wednesday will remember you. The old man on the bench down the block will remember you. The kid you smiled at on the train. The cashier whose name you finally asked. Those people will remember you because you existed in their physical space. You took up air. You took up time. You took up retina. The internet doesn't do that. Real life does.
The trade is brutal when you actually look at it. Online you reach more people but mean less. Offline you reach fewer people but mean more. We've been told for 20 years that reach is the whole game. That broadcast is the whole game. I don't buy it anymore. I think meaning is the whole game and we've been chasing the wrong currency the entire time.
So go to the store. Walk somewhere you don't usually walk. Tip the dude at the smoke shop. Compliment the barista's earrings. Smile at the security guard. Say good morning back when somebody says it to you instead of staring through them like a ghost. Build a tiny little net of micro-recognition around your physical life. That net will hold you up on days the internet can't.
The internet will never love you back. Your physical world might.
it is what it is twinski.