Human slop

I have three Instagram accounts, which is three more than anyone needs.

One afternoon I was zoning out at a tram stop. It occurred to me that if a stranger walked up and fed me something with a spoon, I’d probably swallow it without much thought. That was my relationship with the scroll. My jaw was slack. The algorithm pours and I receive.

I tried to fix it. As they say, ‘what you’re not changing, you’re choosing.’

• I went web-only and turned off notifications. I turned them back on because the checking was worse than the responding. I put opening hours in my bio, hoping to biohack myself into believing I had a legitimate reason to respond three business days later. It made no difference. I was active like a sweatshop.
• Next came the screen-time widget, paired with a black-and-white wallpaper of my partner behind bars, looking up at the counter in quiet disappointment. Even then, I was unstoppable.
  

Then came 2026 and something quietly shifted. It wasn’t a sudden win for willpower; it was simply because I was finally able to scratch the itch of outputting my thoughts before the scroll could numb them. NotebookLM now reads through my entire nonfiction backlog so I don’t have to. Claude Code has finally caught up with natural language, which I’ve been waiting for since the day I gave up trying to learn theirs. And, perhaps more importantly, I’m finally living slowly enough to notice what I actually want to spend my time on.

Back at that same tram stop, the roles have reversed. I ramble into voice memos while AI handles the mess, letting the ideas flow without friction. The barriers are gone, and finally, I am the one curating, remixing, and serving the stories.