Why We Are Never Truly Alone Anymore.
And how we are losing many parts of ourselves because of it
Farid Ramdane
2/12/20262 min read
In the pre-digital era, human existence was structured around empty gaps. Waiting for a train, walking down a street, or sitting quietly in a room required a person to he left entirely alone with their own mind. Today, those silent spaces have been systematically egineered our of existence. The second boredom or silence threatens to surface, we instinctively reach for screen. By consuming the thoughts, anxieties, and opinions of strangers every signle minute, we are quietly dismantling our own individuality. True human uniqueness relies on isolation of thought. That's why when you spend every waking moment digesting standardizedfeed, your mind ceases to create original insights, thus you transform into an identical copy of the crowd you consume.
Many believe they are immune to this digital conditioning. They argue that they can scroll mindlessly while remaining detached, convinced that their internal self is too secure to be intimately influenced. This is a dangerous psychological delusion.
Truth is, influence does not require your conscious permission. The vast majority of digital programming bypasses your active awareness and operates within the subconscious. Every piece of content you digest, every repetetive caption you read, and every superficial trend you witness acts as raw data for your brain. Which means that you're training your mind to think,react, and worry exactly like the algorithm wants you to.
To preserve your individuality, the solution is not emotional departure from the modern world. social media, after all, is a tool for connection, distribution, and modern laverage. The objective is absolute sovereignty over your own attention. You must learn to use the machine without letting the machine consume your uniqueness.
This requires the construction of cognitive borders. You must violently protect a few moments of absolute solitude every day for mental calibration. When you sit somwhere without a screen, without music, and without external inputs, your brain finally stops processing the noise of the crowd. In that silence, your original thoughts finally have space to suface. You begin to remember who you actually are outside of the algorithm's influence.
When I get asked about how I get the raw material and inspiration to write non-fiction books such as The Unwasted Life, my first answer is usually about being alone at times and giving my original thoughts a chance. It might seem too vague to you, but I can assure you that every creative and orignal work starts from a place of being alone with minimal external influence.
At the end, for me it's a modern tragedy to live a life dictated by the averaged preferences of strangers rather than the power of one's own origiality. The mind deserves an opportunity to let its uniaueness surface at least a few times a day.
!: What about real social interactions with others, don't they influence us just the same ? Well, it's a bit different, and we'll cover it in the next one. you can check out my social media for more, or pick up one of my books for detailed exploration of similar subjects.
Farid writes.