Autocorrect has betrayed me more times than I can count. More than once, it even changed a word into a woman’s name, nearly sparking an argument I never intended to start. Predictive text isn’t much better. Type a few letters and your phone rushes to finish the thought for you. Even our replies are drafted for us now, three little bubbles of “Maybe you meant this.”

We built tools to help us, but those tools started shaping us. Autocorrect doesn’t just fix typos, it changes tone and intent. Predictive search doesn’t just save time, it narrows curiosity into repetition. Bit by bit, we stop choosing our words and start letting the machine choose them for us.

And that’s the point: technology isn’t the enemy. Our complacency is.

This is the universal trade we keep making. We handed over math to calculators, maps to GPS, spelling to spellcheck, and memory to our phones. None of these trades looked catastrophic at the time. But the pattern is always the same: the more we outsource, the less we exercise. And what we don’t exercise, we lose.

It’s not just about convenience. It’s seduction. These tools sell us the same story over and over: Don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe. I’ll make sure you don’t fail. I’ll make life easier. And while they soothe us, they shrink us.

When Spike Jonze released Her in 2013, it felt like science fiction. A lonely man falling in love with the voice of his operating system. Now, AI “partners” and “friends” are sold to the masses. What could have been lifelines for people who genuinely struggle to connect have instead been turned into luxury toys. We didn’t just avoid risk, we programmed compliance and called it intimacy.

The real future we face isn’t rebellion against machines. It’s irrelevance. Not because the tools stole our souls, but because we sold them.

The good news is this: the soul isn’t for sale unless we hand it over. Tools can serve us, but only if we stay awake.

When people picture collapse, they imagine something dramatic: alarms blaring, floods rushing in, fire and ruin. But that’s not how it usually happens.

We didn’t lose the sacred all at once. There was no alarm, no collapse, no flood warning us. It was just a slow leak. The leak matters, not because the past was better, but because what leaked out was the texture of being human. We traded tangible, lived experience for convenience. We outsourced memory, attention, and imagination to our devices, and in doing so, we let those muscles atrophy. When the sacred is gone, life doesn’t feel fuller, it feels thinner, flatter, like something essential got drained out.

I think about the little things we no longer do. There was a time when you memorized phone numbers because you had to carry them in your head. A time when you traced a map with your finger before leaving the house, memorizing turns and landmarks. Now we hand our phones to strangers to type in their number and let the device remember for us. Now we ask GPS to guide us through towns we’ve lived in for years.

We’ve also lost something quieter: the ability to touch the sources of our own story. For most of human history, wisdom, memory, and truth were carried in tangible forms like letters, journals, and original documents. To read them was to touch the past directly. Now we rely on summaries, interpretations, and filtered fragments delivered through a screen.

That slow leak didn’t just drain our memory. It drained our connection. We outsource not only our numbers and directions but our presence, our creativity, our sense of wonder. And it’s not dramatic enough to notice, until you look back and realize whole rooms of your life are empty.

The Truman Show was a comedy when it came out, but in hindsight it feels prophetic. A world where every moment is orchestrated, every view filtered, every connection manufactured. That’s not fiction anymore, that’s Tuesday night scrolling. The screen tells us what to buy, what to fear, what to dream about, and we call it choice. Meanwhile, we leak away the very things that make us human: our silence, our curiosity, our imagination, our soul.

The danger isn’t that someone stole these things from us. It’s that we traded them for convenience. Step by step, click by click, distraction by distraction, we chose ease over depth, entertainment over meaning, simulation over the raw and sacred texture of life.

But here’s the truth: the leak can be stopped. Not by throwing out your phone or raging against technology, that’s just noise in the other direction. It starts with noticing. With reclaiming one small sacred act at a time. Write a letter by hand. Memorize a number. Sit in silence long enough to hear your own thoughts instead of a feed telling you what to think.

We lost the sacred slowly, and that means we can reclaim it slowly too. One choice at a time.

We live in a world where almost all the knowledge of human history, with only fragments lost, now fits into our pockets. It should be one of humanity’s most remarkable feats. Instead, it has made us lazy and complacent. Algorithms don’t just deliver information; they decide what is worth our attention. They trap us in echo chambers where opinions pose as truth, and anyone who dares question the script is quickly cast as “other”: bigot, fascist, whatever-phobe. In this world, truth isn’t about what is; it’s about what trends.

But the truth is this: we never meet the world directly. We live in interpretation, in our perception of what is real. Husserl argued that reality reaches us only through phenomena, as they appear. Heidegger pressed further: we are not neutral observers of the world but thrown into it, already interpreting. Sartre said it most plainly: existence precedes essence. We first find ourselves here, then decide what meaning to give it.

That’s not just philosophy, it’s everyday life. The way you scroll, the way you work, the way you decide who you are.

Reality is not a fixed script. It is filtered, interpreted, and lived. The stories we inherit, the roles we perform, and the systems that demand our attention all shape the lens through which we perceive what is true. We cannot escape the lens. But we are not prisoners of it, either. To reclaim your life is to take responsibility for the lens. To see the distortion, and to decide, deliberately, what you will give your power to.

The trade wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t a collapse or rebellion, but a slow leak. The sacred didn’t vanish; it was traded: presence for motion, silence for a screen, ritual for spectacle. We called it progress because it was new, because everyone else seemed fine, because pausing to ask if we were okay felt strange.

Most people don’t notice the hunger itself. They see the symptoms.
Restlessness.
The scroll reflex at red lights.
A room full of people and the sharp loneliness spreading like fog.
Sleep that doesn’t restore. Work that doesn’t fulfill. Lives that feel busy but thin, constantly moving but rarely alive.

Meanwhile, entire industries – political, corporate, algorithmic – exist to feed that hunger just enough to keep us running. Not satisfied. Just busy. If you’re constantly stimulated, you never stop long enough to feel what the noise is costing you. You won’t ask the dangerous questions.

Questions like:
• What if the things we were told to chase aren’t actually living?
• What if strength isn’t the mask, but the courage to take it off?
• What if grief, love, and silence aren’t obstacles, but the only doors to what’s real?

We are starving in a marketplace full of food. As a therapist, I sit with people who are exhausted, anxious, disconnected, and convinced that something is wrong with them. They aren’t broken. They’re living in a system where everything loud pushes out everything alive. Distraction numbs pain. But it numbs everything else, too. When the inevitable losses come, and they always do, an unpracticed soul shatters. Not because they’re defective, but because we taught them speed instead of grief, performance instead of presence, outrage instead of courage.

The cost is heavier than most people notice because it doesn’t hit all at once. It creeps. We trade attention for distraction until silence feels unbearable. We trade connection for performance until we feel unknown even in crowded rooms. We trade ritual for spectacle until grief rots beneath the surface and explodes sideways as rage or conspiracy.

This is the bill coming due.                                  

The world won’t slow down. The algorithms won’t stop. The noise may never fade. But we don’t have to live hollow lives. Surviving awake is hard. Surviving hollow is harder.

So choose your hard, or it will be chosen for you