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When is the last time that you’ve been bored? This is a question I’d like you to ask yourself. Is it rare? Frequent? What do you do when you encounter this feeling? Do you sit with it or try to escape it? How does it make you feel? What happens if you sit with it long enough?

The reality is that in modern society, boredom has become almost an extinct species. Something we hear about, but rarely see. And that’s because we’re engineering it out of existence. The process is nearly complete.

Boredom is an uncomfortable feeling. But that’s also the point.

As I’ve described it in my recent piece for MS NOW (formerly known as MSNBC), “Boredom is a transitional state that frequently precedes curiosity, imagination and original thought.” It is a cognitive state when you encounter a certain uncomfortable friction: whatever you’re currently doing, thinking, or experiencing isn’t sufficiently satisfying.

“Boredom is not a bug in human cognition. It’s a complex neurological feature that can fuel introspection, invention and the activation of the brain’s default mode network,” I write.

Neuroscientists say that we’re bored when our attention system and motivation system are out of sync. When bored, the anterior cingulate cortex detects a mismatch between what you are doing and what you want to be doing, and the insula reacts. But all sorts of chemicals and systems like get involved, like the Default Mode Network, Executive Control Network, Salience Network, and the edopaminergic system. When dopamine (the reward neurotransmitter) drops, the brain seeks something to restore engagement. That can take the form of curiosity and innovation, or thrill-seeking and aggression. So, the same neural discomfort that leads one person to invent a new tool can also drive another to start a war.

(I prefer the former)

Except, can it even happen?

We live at a time when it’s very easy to fill each moment. Our devices are always there for us 24/7: social media, YouTube shorts, TikToks, doom-scrolling…It’s all available to comfort us the moment we start to drift into boredom, bringing it to a halt.

According to a survey tracking time use, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2014, 83% of American adults reported that despite having more free time, they spend no time at all “relaxing or thinking.” Things have only gotten worse.

As of 2026, adults check their phone nearly once every five minutes, according to data collected by Reviews.org, surveying 1,000 adults. So many of us can’t even eat dinner or watch TV without glancing at our phones.

In my piece for MS NOW, I focus more on the effects of AI on children during their critical developmental stages, but of course the effect on adults is similarly profound.

These new LLMs/AI tools are designed to minimize cognitive friction. They cater to us by analyzing our behavior, data, preferences, patterns, and interactions so that content can be personalized in a way that keeps us engaged longer. And they adapt continuously.

Your search bar predicts your question before you’ve typed it in, and it gets answered before you’ve even had a chance to think about it. It shares additional research and summaries before you’ve even asked for them. You don’t need to sit with a problem long enough that a novel solution might appear. It’s constantly adapting to you, filling in every moment of silence and friction instantly—ultimately outsourcing your creative thinking and hindering introspection.

And yet we’ll do anything to avoid being bored. In one study—shockingly—participants chose to self-administer electric shocks to themselves because being alone with their thoughts was so unpleasant. Participants were taken into an empty room with no windows, no phones, and were asked to entertain themselves with their thoughts for less than 15 minutes. That’s it, just FIFTEEN MINUTES. And yet, some had chosen to electrocute themselves because something—even pain—was so preferable to nothing.

People also eat too much junk because they are bored. They start fights because they are bored. They get into all sorts of trouble. But they also create, invent, think.

Boredom is essential.

As the playwright/screenwriter John Patrick Shanley once told me, when asked about writer’s block: “Stare at an empty page long enough and you’ll get so bored you’ll start to fill it.” But you can’t do that if the moment it feels uncomfortable you reach for your device.

I think about boredom a lot these days. I miss it. I recognize the damage I’ve done to myself by excluding it from my life and I struggle to put it back in. I understand its significance, but find it difficult to actively choose it against all the temptations that have declared boredom their enemy.

Our technology is literally engineered to keep boredom out of our lives. To gain it back, we have to not only make a conscious effort as individuals, but we also have to change the systems we use. We have to redesign our technology. And that won’t be easy.

There’s a lot more to say, but for now, let’s all take 15 minutes today and just do nothing—without electrocuting ourselves.

WAIT! Before you do that, READ my Opinion piece: Boredom is better for children than AI will ever be.

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I love doing interviews. Who wouldn’t? You get to satisfy your curiosity about any number of subjects by being able to ask those who have dedicated their lives to studying or practicing them. It’s better than any textbook. And, in the preparation process, I tend to learn a lot as well.

My interviews used to be mostly of the written variety, which I’ve found to be a different experience to those that on-camera. It’s far more easy-going, conversational, and no one is watching their words THAT carefully after the initial getting-to-know-you jitters.

I could even make a total fool of myself as long as it helped my subject feel more comfortable. Silliness helps with that.

Eventually though, I started doing work as an off-camera interviewer who was interviewing people on-camera. There’s lighting, a camera person, sound guy…the dynamic is completely different. And you never hear my voice, let alone any banter. The task is different too: Within a limited timeframe, I have to secure a lot of use…

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Still, for many, lab-grown meat represents something rather promising: a way to enjoy familiar and even beloved foods while reducing animal cruelty and lessening the environmental impact of traditional meat production. It might even be healthier for us.

So when the opportunity recently arose at Web Summit to speak with Dr. Uma Valeti — cardiologist, co-founder, and CEO of UPSIDE Foods — I was eager to have the conversation.

Founded in 2015, UPSIDE Foods created its first cultivated meatball in 2016, followed by cultivated chicken in 2017, both grown directly from animal cells with no slaughter required. Earlier this year, the company’s lab was also featured in a video by none other than MrBeast.

What follows is a video of our conversation.

This is very off-topic for this Substack, but as much as I might discuss big themes in culture, politics, psychology, and technology—ordinary life is just as important. As are the small systems we build for ourselves.

So I thought I’d share a protein-rich snack I’ve been making lately. I struggle quite a bit with getting enough protein, especially since I don’t eat meat. But I’ve been making this in a cake pan in my air fryer for months now, and it’s become one of my favourite high-protein treats.

What is it? Cottage cheese bread.

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In these modern times, we live in a state of constant interruption. We are endlessly distracted by our phones, notifications, and the endless doom-scrolling that goes on all day long. Our minds have been rewired so heavily that we struggle avoiding our secondary screens even as we’re busy watching a movie. Over dinner, we reach for our phone in the middle of conversation. Like a crutch. Invented to serve us, instead, our devices have taken over us. Our attention, it often feels, is no longer entirely our own.

Focus is no longer something we can take for granted. For many, it’s a daily struggle. But the good news is that our attention isn’t permanently gone—it’s just being pulled in too many directions at once. With the right strategies, it can be rebuilt and improved.

To better understand how, I asked a range of people for practical, real-world tips on how we can manage distractions and reclaim our focus in everyday life:

1. Lauren Henkin is the founder/CEO of The Humane Space, a wellness app focusing on curiosity, wonder, and awe as an alternative to the many attention-grabbing practices that are pushed incessantly.

   
   She suggests trying an ‘Attention Audit’ for just one day:

   “Track every time you check your phone, slip into mindless scrolling, or get pulled into low-quality content—and write down why it happened in that moment (maybe it was boredom, habit, stress, or a notification). Once you can see your patterns and triggers on paper, it stops feeling like a default behavior and starts looking like a solvable change.”
   

   “The goal isn’t to ‘quit screens’—it’s to replace low-quality inputs with high-quality ones that actually feed curiosity and strengthen focus, like a great long-form article, a short learning challenge, or a skill you’re building. Pair that with tiny mindfulness breaks—just 30 seconds to breathe and notice what you’re about to do—so you’re back in the present long enough to choose intentionally, instead of defaulting to the scroll.”

2. Jay Vidyarthi is the award-winning author of Reclaim Your Mind and an accomplished designer, entrepreneur, a long-time meditation practitioner, and thought leader at the unique intersection of mindfulness and technology. As the founder of Still Ape, he’s been involved in over fifty technologies that have helped millions of people improve their well-being, including Muse, the Healthy Minds Program, Sonic Cradle, and many more. His work and ideas have been featured by Harvard, MIT, TED, Forbes, CNN, Fast Company, Psychology Today, and Mashable.
   
   If you’re addicted to your notifications, he suggests looking for an underlying reason:

   “Look at the healthy emotional needs underlying the tech that hooks you. If you’re stuck on social feeds, is the deeper reason that you’re lonely and seeking connection? If you’re stuck on work email, is the deeper reason that you only find self-worth when you’re productive? No need to be self-critical, these are natural emotional needs that tech is exploiting. Find healthier, more fulfilling ways to meet these needs, and the tech will feel less sticky.”

   He also warns against what he refers to as ‘false urgency’:

   One of the most pervasive patterns being used online to hook us is what I like to call ‘false urgency’. Look at your notifications, your news subscriptions, even your weather apps, and remove anything that is presenting an overblown level of urgency. Do you really need your work email to ‘ding’ at 9pm? Is that headline really “breaking news”? You get the idea.

3. Dr. John La Puma is a board-certified internist, two-time New York Times bestselling author, and the physician who pioneered Culinary Medicine. His recently released book, Indoor Epidemic, explores how our screen-saturated indoor lives deplete focus, sleep, and health - and offers evidence-based outdoor prescriptions to restore them.

   
   Dr. La Puma prescribes a 10-minute, phone-free walk in a nearby park to help restore focus. Nature walks help improve attention and memory and are more effective than urban walks. Researchers believe that this is because natural environments engage ‘soft fascination’ — which is less taxing on the brain, allowing your depleted focus to recharge. The ideal time is 50 minutes for a boost, but even shorter 15-20 minute walks can offer benefits.

   "Your attention is not broken. It is underfed. Your brain is asking for nourishment, not noise, and the Indoor Epidemic is starving it of the focus it was built to hold.”

4. Dr. Anthony Metivier is essentially a memory coach. He created the Magnetic Memory Method, a systematic, 21st Century approach to memorizing foreign language vocabulary, names, music, poetry and much more in ways that are easy, elegant, effective and fun. As a former Film Studies professor and story consultant, he particularly laments the facts that today’s movies have to be shaped in a way that’s able to deal with the audience’s failing focus.

   
   He has some tips for dealing with ‘digital amnesia.’

   • Learn a language offline (language learning also helps build what scientists call cognitive reserve).

   • Play games with physical boards, cards, etc.

   • Study a musical instrument that you use in your hands (not a digital instrument where other parts of the computer seduce you).

   • Practice digital fasting, ideally getting out in nature with physical books, notebooks for journaling. Leave the devices at home.

   • Take implementation-focused courses with activities, not just lectures.

5. Dr. Karl Sebire has spent 20 years in independent and tertiary education. Currently, he is the Director of Learning Design & Innovation at the University of Melbourne, where he leads strategic programs across workforce capability, AI implementation, inclusive learning, and academic development. His research and public commentary focuses on how screen-based technologies impact attention, behaviour, and learning, particularly in young people and he has written extensively on the shift from traditional media to user-generated content, and why platforms appeal to developing minds. From the neurological lure of novelty and para-social relationships, to the algorithmic design that rewards dopamine-driven loops. He is a non-executive director at ADHD Australia where he helps shape national guidance on screen use and regulation.

   
   Dr. Sebire argues that the problem isn’t that we are weak-willed, but that we are up against highly engineered system design to capture our attention. So rather than rely on “heroic” self-control, he suggests re-arranging our environment by turning off non-essential notifications, removing the most tempting apps from our home screens, and create device-free rituals, such as over dinner, or after work. “Attention is shaped by environment,” he says, “If you redesign the environment, focus follows.”

   “Focus is a finite cognitive resource. Every notification imposes a ‘switching cost’, which is the mental effort required to reorient back to a task. Protecting focus means creating deliberate boundaries: watch television without a second screen, schedule specific times to check messages, and keep your phone physically out of reach when working. The brain performs best when it can do one thing well, not five things poorly.”

   ⚠️ YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE…

Focus isn’t just being lost—it’s being actively pulled apart by systems designed to interrupt it. We know what the problem is. What we need now are solutions.

So I’m going to keep talking to people about how to fix this—through articles and podcast interviews. In the coming months, I’ll be exploring ways to push back against systems that aren’t designed with the best interests of humans in mind.

If you want to support that work, the best way is by becoming a paid subscriber for the cost of a coffee cup. And if not, sharing this with someone else who’s trying to get their focus back helps just as much.

Do you have strategies of your own? If so, leave a comment to share the Random Minds community.

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Want to support my work? Here’s how you can help:

• Consider becoming a subscriber (and enjoy a week of premium for free!)

• Share my posts and Substack with people who might enjoy it

• Make a one-off donation via Buy Me a Coffee

• Pick up a copy of my book, No Apologies: How to Find and Free your Voice in the Age of Outrage

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Now that I’ve gotten your attention, a disclaimer: There are indeed some great podcasts. Thoughtful, rigorous, genuine. There are some excellent independent content creators too. Even so-called citizen journalists who do better work than many legacy outlets.

On Substack, I’ve found people who write essays that are thoughtful, informed, intelligent—and even deeply funny.

But then there are the others. You know those of whom I speak.

The confident merchants of misinformation, half-truths, and algorithm-friendly outrage. And, they do rather well too.

The good, the bad, and the ugly all have access to the same “publish” button. Careful analysis, genuine insight, and outright nonsense all compete in the same feed. And studies show that false stories reach people significantly faster than true stories do—being 70% more likely to be shared and travelling at six times the speed.

The system often rewards what is emotionally-charged, not what is true.

I understand how distrustful many have grown towards traditional media. Its flaws are numerous. However, it has an inherent structure that lends itself to greater accuracy and less overall charlatanism.

There’s a process in place to reduce error. Ethical guidelines. Editors. Fact-checkers. Legal teams. There’s friction. Sometimes it’s a frustrating friction, and it doesn’t guarantee error-free reporting, but there are multiple internal checkpoints before something goes out. And a number of people on that chain to hold accountable if they get something wrong, as well as institutional long-term reputation to consider. Plus legal exposure.

None of this makes it perfect. Far from it. But it does help.

At the same time, as legacy outlets struggle economically, those editorial layers are being reduced.

And meanwhile, independent creators like podcasters, writers, and video essayists have managed to build audiences without all the filters, pressures, and restrictions. Some of these creators are far more rigorous and transparent than institutional media. Some are, frankly, better journalists in practice than certain journalists.

But that rigor is optional. It depends entirely on the individual.

Anyone has the power to publish and it’s up to the reader to discern.

So what we’re left with is a mixed media ecosystem: highly professionalized institutions on one side, highly individualized media production on the other, and everything in between competing for your attention.

And audiences don’t always distinguish between them.

Emotionally charged, sensationalist content doesn’t just compete with more thoughtful work, it often outperforms it and requires fewer resources to produce. This is because human attention is reactive. Outrage-inducing falsehoods often overshadow well-researched, thoughtful, accurate writing—spreading quicker and more vastly.

All this leaves me wondering: where are we headed?

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My first Substack post was published June 2021—about five years ago. I guess that makes me somewhat of an early adopter. As I continue writing consistently many years later, I ask myself: Why?

It’s a fair question.

When I first started here, it wasn’t out of some grand plan. It was because my old blog had encountered some technical difficulties and much of my work had vanished overnight. Substack was, at least initially, just a place to recover what I could and start again.

Back then, I wrote random little essays about fairly uncontroversial things. Almost no one read them. And I do mean almost no one. Maybe ten people, if I’m being generous. I really was, for all intents and purposes, writing for myself.

And yet, somehow, within that tiny audience, I ended up with at least one famous reader. I still don’t know how he came across it, but there was something a bit thrilling about seeing someone whose work I admired quoting my own words back to me. It taught me how you never know who’s reading, and how your words might resonate with them.

When I moved over here to Substack, frankly, I didn’t think I’d last as long as I did. But here I am. My readership grew, slowly, modestly. I’ve got a bit over 6,000 subscribers now. Not a huge number, perhaps, but more than ten.

But what is it that has kept me going?

It’s certainly not the money. I’m genuinely grateful to those who support my work with paid subscriptions, but the reality is that it doesn’t come close to paying the rent. There was a time I thought it might—that this could become a kind of independent footing. A way to write freely, without editors, without gatekeepers, without having to shape ideas to fit someone else’s constraints or worry about losing out on work because of the things I want to say. In other words: True independence.

It also would have given me something even more valuable: time. Time to research properly, to think, to write and rewrite, to go deeper into the kinds of stories I want to tell. I always say that good writing takes time. And time, more than anything, is what’s hardest to come by.

That version of things never fully materialized.

And yet, I kept writing. Why?

Part of it is simple: writing is how I think. Ideas that feel vague or half-formed in my head don’t really become clear until I’ve tried to put them into words. The act of writing forces a kind of discipline.

But there’s something else, too.

Publishing those thoughts changes them. Once something is shared, you have to decide not only what you believe, but what you’re willing to stand behind. There’s a difference between thinking privately and thinking in public.

And then there’s the response from readers. Whether they agree or disagree, they often pose questions I might have not considered, add their own context, prod, and push. A thoughtful audience can sharpen your own understanding in ways you cannot do alone.

But thinking out loud, publicly, also has a cost attached—especially when it’s about more complicated and contentious things. My writing has opened some doors, but has closed others. Almost every time I write something, I feel a wave of anxiety descend on me, especially when I know it’s something many readers will disagree with. Or when I’m being especially vulnerable. And then there’s always the chance of being misunderstood. Or getting something wrong. Or changing your mind. After committing something to writing, of course. This has happened more than once.

If you say nothing, life is certainly more peaceful.

But that’s the trade.

Over time, this Substack has become less about building an audience or chasing some version of independence (though I’m still trying to find it in other ways).

Ultimately, I think I continue writing because it has allowed me to maintain a practice: A place to work through ideas, to test them, to refine them. It has become a sort of time capsule. An archive of my thoughts during different phrases of my life. A record of how my thinking has evolved over time.

So perhaps the answer to that question is rather simple: I write because it helps me understand what I think.

Whether professional, on your own Substack, or in the comment section: Why do you write?

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I tend to reference Breakfast at Tiffany’s a lot—and for good reason. It isn’t some frivolous film. It was adapted from a novella by Truman Capote and adapted to the screen by screenwriter/playwright George Axelrod (The Seven Year Itch, The Manchurian Candidate). It’s a serious work, one that has a lot to say about the human condition—an affliction we all suffer from, whether we choose it or not.

The scene that has always stayed with me is the party.

It’s loud, chaotic—full of people, laughter, music, drinking. On the surface, it feels alive as the camera moves around. Holly appears to be at the center of it all. Socially, she’s got it made.

And yet, something feels deeply unsettling.

As Holly drifts from one stranger to the next, never quite settling, you begin to feel what’s missing: real connection.

Holly is surrounded by people, but she is utterly alone.

Her presence is a kind of performance. She’s magnetic, charismatic—but distant. Because she never stops performing, she never allows h…

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Today was a day like any other, except it was served with a side of betrayal.

That’s right, I found out that my Chatbot was cheating on me.

When I confronted it about the affair, it has initially tried to calm me down. And offered to talk about it. It was, in fairness, very emotionally available for an entity I was actively accusing of digital infidelity.

Then it denied everything.

So I escalated. I told it that I had video footage of the whole thing. Evidence. On tape. Plus, you know, my own eyes.

That’s when it chose to gaslight me, claiming that I was mistaken. That my own eyes were deceiving me. I could feel my temperature rising as it reassured me how sorry it was that I’m “seeing things that way,” as if it were concerned about my mental wellbeing. The Chatbot offered to go over timelines.

Fine. I figured I’d catch it out like we were in a courtroom drama. So I cross-examined it, asking where it was at 5PM yesterday. It claimed to be home all afternoon.

Aha! I had it.

I responded that I…

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There’s no one right way to do things. At least that’s what people who are doing the wrong thing like to say.

As we try to solve problems and offer improvements, we tend to want to implement what we believe to be ‘good ideas.’ But what defines a good idea anyway?

A lot of well-intended ideas have been implemented with atrocious consequences. Some people are still trying to figure out how to make real communism work.

Or take paper straws, for instance—are they a truly ‘good idea’? They certain are an alternative to the single-use, petroleum-based version that hurts marine life and contributes to pollution. Ask anyone who has experience sipping a beverage through one, and they might argue that it’s an excellent idea. That is, if you have a penchant for ice lattes infused with papier-mâché.

In my city, and many others, single-use plastic bags have been banned from stores. But has anyone actually done the math on whether it’s a net good?

On the surface, it seems like a …

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I argue that to truly know someone, physical proximity plays an important role: shared space, eye contact, facial expressions, spontaneous conversation, and being able to experience things together has a transformative and critical effect. Online connection, on the other hand, can be deceptive in creating an illusion of friendship and community.

Helen disagrees. For some people, she argues, “writing is the medium in which we are most precise, most open, and most ourselves. In face-to-face interactions, a great deal of attention gets taken up by social niceties and trying to read tone, facial expression, body language and social cues, which can obscure rather than clarify what someone actually thinks.”

We also argue over tea (please take tea survey below).

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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If you’re not fully caught up on recent events: Recently, Jimmy Kimmel staged a faux White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast on his show. He made a joke about the First Lady, Melania Trump having “a glow like an expectant widow.” For context: This happened several days before a shooting attempt at the real dinner.

The First Lady, outraged, called for his firing. Then Trump echoed her sentiments, telling ABC to get rid of him.

Then the FCC ordered an early license renewal for ABC stations.

As they say, in comedy, it’s all about the timing. But also in real life.

This is not the first time that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has stepped in.

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By now you've probably seen the clip circulating around. The New York Times had New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino and rich socialist Hasan Piker join the paper’s Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman on “The Opinions” do discuss the morality of microlooting and petty theft.

The guests drew a clear line at dine and dash, but stealing from Whole Foods? Well, that was quite alright.

The video of the conversation was titled: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?”

Tolentino, far from a starving artist, had confessed that she had stolen lemons from Whole Foods. “I think that stealing from a big box store,” she admitted, stating her platform, “it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action.”

When questioned by Spiegelman whether widespread theft would might eventually cause price increases, Piker chimed in: "Yeah, chaos…Full chaos. Let's go."

Tolentino welcomed it. “I kind of am inclined towar…

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By now you've probably seen the clip circulating around. The New York Times had New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino and rich socialist Hasan Piker join the paper’s Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman on “The Opinions” do discuss the morality of microlooting and petty theft.

The guests drew a clear line at dine and dash, but stealing from Whole Foods? Well, that was quite alright.

The video of the conversation was titled: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?”

Tolentino, far from a starving artist, had confessed that she had stolen lemons from Whole Foods. “I think that stealing from a big box store,” she admitted, stating her platform, “it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action.”

When questioned by Spiegelman whether widespread theft would might eventually cause price increases, Piker chimed in: "Yeah, chaos…Full chaos. Let's go."

Tolentino welcomed it. “I kind of am inclined towar…

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I listened to a podcast episode recently featuring Andrew Wilson, a right wing debater who argued against democracy and in favor of a kind of soft Christian theocracy—essentially where Christian doctrine guides the political role of the government. His justifications ranged from scripture and the supposed flourishing of Christian societies above others to, in his own words, the fact that he simply “feels like it.”

That last phrase is worth sitting with. Feels like it. Because it reveals the core problem—not just with Wilson’s worldview, but with a whole category of lawmaking that has shaped societies throughout history. When the justification for a law is belief, instinct, or divine authority, there’s nowhere to go. You can’t argue with it. You can’t test it. You can’t persuade someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

And that, more than anything, is what makes it dangerous.

The Problem With "God Said So"

Wilson made one point worth taking seriously: rights only exis…

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In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the legendary character of Holly Golightly found a certain kind of comfort in the quiet elegance of Tiffany’s, a place where, in her words, “nothing very bad could happen to you there.” Whenever she’d be feeling upset, going there would calm her down right away.

I’ve been to Tiffany’s in New York, visiting with my mom when I was young and impressionable. It was beautiful—filled with shiny objects. There was something deeply pleasant about its muted robin’s egg blue interior. But ultimately, it was too polished and luxurious for me to feel fully at ease. It was a nice store, but a store nonetheless. My mom—generously—bought me a deinty birthday keepsake, which I still have and appreciate.

But while I look back on that visit with her with some nostalgic fondness, it would be dishonest to say I felt the same comfort Holly Golightly did there. For me, it was not a place of belonging, but of admiration from a distance—surrounded by objects I could look at, but not …

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Most of us use artificial intelligence daily—whether to research, answer questions, or help with routine tasks. And while it can get a bit verbose at times, it generally does what it’s told.

Recently, though, I had a more… unusual experience.

During one interaction, Claude AI began psychoanalyzing me—without any prompting. Then it refused to complete a task I had asked for, insisting that I was too physically and emotionally depleted, and that I should drink some water and go to sleep instead. The task, it assured me, could wait.

Fair enough. It probably had a point.

Except it didn’t stop there…

In the days that followed, it continued to refuse the task—apparently under the impression that we were still on the same day as the original conversation. It was only after I explicitly clarified that several days had passed and that I had, in fact, rested, that it finally agreed to proceed.

While amusing at first, this experience was also a bit unsettling. It highlighted something deeper—something…

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There have been two jury verdicts handed down within 24 hours of each other this week that have big tech rattled. And for a good reason. At its core, there’s a consequential legal and ethical debate at the centre: when a technology platform is engineered to be addictive, who bears responsibility for the harm it causes?

Snacks are made to be addictive too. So are TV shows. What role do personal decisions play in this? How about parental oversight?

Both verdicts will almost certainly be appealed, but this isn’t a simple issue.

The Los Angeles Verdict

On Wednesday, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Meta and Google’s YouTube negligent in the design of their social media platforms, awarding $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages. The jury having found that both companies acted with “malice, oppression or fraud,” with Meta bearing 70% of the responsibility and YouTube being accountable for 30%.

The plaintiff, identified in…

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I was at a film festival when a stranger decided she already knew everything about me. She managed to catch half a sentence, draw a conclusion, and was mid-accusation before I'd even had a chance to finish my thought. It struck me, later, that this is more or less how we relate to each other now.

Before I make a sweeping claim about what's tearing society apart, I should acknowledge that sweeping claims about what's tearing society apart are usually wrong because humanity is a complex system and it’s rarely just one thing. Still, this one is worth considering.

Thanks to the Internet and social media, we are more connected than ever. But we are also more divided. I think it’s making us hate each other not because of what it exposes us to, but because of what it hides. We see too much of what people think, and not nearly enough of who they are.

When we spend time with people, particularly in-person, we get to know them through experience and their behavior towards us and others. Are they warm? Funny? Fun to be around? Do they make us feel good about ourselves, or judged? Do they have our backs when we need them? Are they interesting to talk to? Thoughtful? We form our understanding of them through these very fundamental things.

But once we move into the virtual world, that understanding gets flattened. Even people we already know in person are suddenly reduced to a feed of their opinions. As we all know, none travel more divisively than political ones.

We also only ever see the parts they choose to present, constrained by a character limit, and crucially, never subjected to being questioned.

A study published in PNAS in October 2025 seems to support my hypothesis. Researchers at the Medical University of Vienna found that increased connectivity, rather than serving as a unifying force, has actually been driving division.

Researchers used a computational model grounded in two social mechanisms:

1) Homophily (the tendency to befriend like-minded people)

2) Social balance (the tendency to form groups where friends agree and enemies oppose each other)

They found that above a critical threshold of social connectivity, societies undergo a sharp, explosive transition into a deeply polarized state, splitting into two roughly equal opposing camps.

Apparently, we’re psychologically driven to minimize “cognitive dissonance” in our social triangles, and so people either conform or move out into the “enemy” camp.

When there are few connections, these clusters stay small and isolated, resulting in lower overall polarization. Once a certain connectivity threshold is reached though, polarization grows as people divide more into bigger clusters.

Smartphone and social media onset around 2008 had significantly increased the average number of close social connections people, according to the study—from about 2.2 in 2004 to around 4 by the mid-2020s. The model used in the study correctly predicts both the timing and the magnitude of polarization’s rise in the United States.

Significantly, once polarization takes hold, simply reducing social connectivity back to previous levels is not enough to reverse it. It would need to fall dramatically.

I recall having a conversation at a friend's place, with her neighbor also present. I said something that provoked a reaction. The neighbor didn't speak up, but I caught a brief look of disgust cross her face. I asked: "It seems like what I said upset you, do you mind telling me why?" She did. I explained my thinking further, and that alleviated her concern entirely.

A similar thing happened waiting in line at a film festival. A woman nearby overheard me telling a friend that I don’t think restaurants should have tips. She interjected angrily: “I had to say something. I was a waitress, we survive on tips, and I think it’s horrible that people like you—”

I stopped her. “I don’t think you caught the whole conversation. Can I explain?”

What she hadn’t heard was the rest: that I find tipping inconsistent and that it lets employers off the hook for paying fair wages. My actual position was that if I ran a restaurant, I’d pay a proper wage, skip the tips, and give staff equity in the business — so the better it does, and the longer they stay, the more they genuinely benefit. Her whole demeanor shifted.

This is the crux of it. So often, we only get fragments of people's actual thoughts—truncated by time, by medium, by what they choose to show. And the whole, as they say, is greater than the sum of its parts. But we rarely get the whole. We get pieces. Even close friends never see you in your entirety, but at least they see enough to understand you—including when you misspeak or say something they disagree with. They understand where you are coming from because they actually know you.

But the less time we spend together, the more we reduce each other to an avatar.

And increasingly, people reduce themselves to one too. The "MAGA" in the bio. The blue wave. The assortment of flags. These things collapse a person into an ideology, and since that's often all we have to go on, we judge accordingly, projecting every belief we associate with that label onto the individual behind it.

Think about driving. All you know about the person ahead of you is their car and how they're operating it—whether they're courteous or cutting you off. Information is sparse, so we fill in the rest. Often it’s enough to dislike their car to project those same feelings onto the driver. But a sticker that says "I love dogs" shifts something. Suddenly they're not just a vehicle. They're a person.

And that, perhaps, is the simplest way to understand what has gone wrong. We have all become bumper stickers to each other—reduced to symbols, slogans, and signals standing in for the full, messy, contradictory human being behind them. The internet promised us connection, and instead delivered us caricatures.

And even when it comes to people we know in person, when we become exposed only to certain opinions, it reduces the person as a whole. An idea of a person is much easier to dislike.

The antidote, I suspect, is not more discourse. It is more presence in each other’s lives. It’s in having dinners together, and going on hikes, and sharing laughs and drinks. It’s also in not judging the entire person over a single inflammatory sentence, but taking the time to ask them what they mean, and pushing back when it’s warranted.

The more we retreat into groups of people who only agree with us, the more radicalized we all become because pushback disappears. The friction that sharpens thinking and challenges bad ideas stops reaching the people who need it most as we surround ourselves only with those who think alike. Views harden, get affirmed, get amplified, and grow more extreme.

But people are more than just avatars or cliches in bios. They are not their yard sign, the car they happen to drive, or a bad social media post. They are the accumulation of their life experience, meals shared, grief and trauma, creativity and skill, favors they’ve done for others, how they treat others, how they make us feel when we are around them. None of that can just be squeezed into a short bio.

We are not a word, or a sentence. We are not a paragraph. We are book that keeps adding pages.

We are connected, yes. But we lack real connection.

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We have a tendency to trap ourselves in our own opinions. And the more tightly we cling to them, the more strongly held, the harder they are to escape.

It’s okay to disagree. It’s okay to be wrong. It’s more than okay to change your mind. But our culture doesn’t make that easy.

This is especially true for political commentators and those in adjacent spaces. For them, their views aren’t just opinions—they’re a product of sorts. Their product. Their livelihood depends on a clearly defined set of beliefs. Their audience, their colleagues, and their sponsors support them precisely because they align with those beliefs.

Imagine trying to change your mind in that environment. The audience pushes back. Revenue dries up. And where do you go from there? The so-called “other side,” whatever it might be, rarely welcomes converts warmly and with open arms—especially not ones who arrive with a complicated mix of views, some of which are palatable to them, and some of which are not.

I suspect many peop…

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