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The algorithm is not the villain here. You are.
When people complain their feed is nothing but rage bait and drama and the worst possible version of everything, they say it like something was done to them. They say it like it just happened to them. Like the app turned evil one day and decided to make their life worse.
You trained it.
Every extra half second you spent on the disaster headline before scrolling. Every comment section you weren't even participating in but couldn't stop reading. Every video that made you feel genuinely terrible that you watched all the way through anyway, the algorithm clocked all of it. Filed it away. Served you more tomorrow.
It's just showing you what you pay attention to. That's literally all it does.
And that's the thing that messes people up, because most of us genuinely have no idea what we're actually paying attention to.
We think we're just scrolling. Killing a few minutes. Not really absorbing anything. But your brain doesn't know you're killing time, it's taking notes the whole time. Every piece of content is quietly doing something to your baseline. Your mood. What feels normal. What kind of world you think you live in. What kind of person you think you are.
Feed it chaos for long enough and chaos starts to feel like reality.
And you won't even notice it happening. Nobody wakes up one morning suddenly more anxious and cynical and convinced everything is on fire. It just kind of becomes the water you swim in. And then one day you're mid-conversation and everything coming out of your mouth is negative and you can't actually remember the last time you felt genuinely excited about something.
That's a diet problem.
Fast forward a year and you're a completely different person, and you have no idea how you got there.
Same job, same city, same people around you, just different, depending on what you've been feeding your brain every single day. And you won't feel it building. The changes are too slow. Too gradual. It's not dramatic enough to notice until you're already there.
The people who seem like they've genuinely got it together, not in a fake gratitude journal way, just actually good energy, interested in things, fun to talk to, they're not wired differently. They're just more careful about what they let in..
Same platforms. Completely different feed. Completely different person over time.
So the defining skill of this decade is learning to shape your feed before it shapes you.
And it goes way beyond unfollowing people who annoy you, that's the easy part. The real thing is becoming aware of what you're actually lingering on versus what you're telling yourself you don't care about. Those two things are almost never the same.
You can follow all the right people and still spend 40 minutes a day watching someone you resent succeed at things you wish you were doing. You can tell yourself you're not into drama while stopping on every drama post for just a second before you keep scrolling.
The algorithm doesn't care what you're telling yourself.
It watches where your eyes stop.
Start genuinely engaging with things that actually pull you in, stuff that makes you feel something good, that shows you a version of the world you want to live in, and within a few weeks the feed shifts. You didn't game it. You just redirected your attention and it followed.
Your attention is the most valuable thing you have. More than your time, more than your money. What you pay attention to shapes what you think about, what you think about shapes what you do, what you do shapes who you become.
You can let an app decide what deserves it.
Or you can.
Either way you're going to become whoever that diet produces. So just make sure you actually want to be that person.
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See you on the next stair,
Alastair