I’ve been in this weird headspace lately where life is just… strange. On the surface, everything is fine. I go to work, eat relatively healthy, try to stay on top of errands, keep things running — the usual. But underneath it all, there's this constant feeling of dull pressure, like I'm being stretched thin by things that don’t really matter. It’s like I’m always busy, but rarely present.
Every day feels packed, but nothing sticks. I go through the motions, check off tasks, scroll a bit, eat, sleep, repeat. I end the day drained, like I ran a marathon in my head — but can’t really remember anything meaningful that happened. It’s not burnout in the dramatic sense, just this low-grade hum of tiredness and disconnection that never really turns off.
Socially, things have gotten quieter too. I barely see my friends anymore. Most of them are still into drinking and going out — stuff that used to feel exciting but now just feels... loud and repetitive. There was no big falling out. Just different rhythms now. Slower ones. And sometimes I sit with that and wonder if it’s just part of growing up, or if something deeper got lost along the way.
And then my brain starts spinning, usually late at night, when everything’s quiet. I start thinking about the future — and it honestly kind of scares me. Not in a dramatic, apocalyptic way, but in that creeping "things-are-moving-too-fast" way. AI is suddenly everywhere. Wars are happening in the background of our everyday lives. Economies feel fragile. Everything seems more unstable than it used to be, like we’re just pretending things are normal while the ground shifts under us.
And weirdly, my mind keeps drifting back to 2006. I don’t even know why exactly — maybe because it felt slower. Simpler. The internet was just fun and weird, not all-consuming. There were fewer screens, fewer existential threats in the news feed. Boredom existed, but it didn’t feel dangerous — it felt open. It felt like space to breathe. Now everything feels compressed, even rest.
I don’t think I’m depressed. I’m not miserable. But I feel… detached. Like I’m watching my life from the outside, waiting for it to feel like mine again. There’s this quiet emptiness running underneath everything, like background static. Not loud enough to break me, just enough to make everything feel slightly out of tune.
Anyone else feel like this? Have you figured out how to shake it — or at least live with it in a way that makes sense?
It's up to us to make it like that again.
I stopped participating/consuming into anything that is algorithmically managed. It means that I cut back on everything online that is not... man-made. I don't do Twitter/X, Facebook, Reddit, and so on. I even almost completely quit using YT beside a couple channels. So, I use Lemmy, watch vids on non-YT platforms (peertube, for example) and I do read blogs and websites... all contents that are all created by actual persons (not some SEO-optimized or AI-crap), actual people that care about what it is they're talking about.
The thing with those corporation-owned 'occupations' is that our live don't belong to us anymore. It's theirs. Our live is a product they are exploiting (mining) and at the same time it's... a service they're selling back directly to us, as well as to other people that the algorithm thinks will (dis)like us.
Realizing that, I decided I did not want to be the product anymore no matter how much I liked their 'services'.
And that was liberating. I would not want to go back to their precious little apps and algorithms. I spend a lot less time online, but I appreciate almost every second of it. Which to me at least seems like a good compromise ;)
edit: clarifications & typos.
I second sticking to social media platforms without an algorithm feed. When I scroll lemmy or mastodon, I feel satisfied sooner that I've seen what I've wanted to see, and actually get tired of content.
Exactly. Algorithm are trained to keep up unsatisfied, they're literal drug dealers.