“Admit it, you aren’t like them…” -Timothy Leary
We live in an age of isolation.
We have all the technology needed to share ourselves freely across time and space, but lack the cultural preparation to be able to do so.
As I write this, my own thoughts are wanting to habitually reserve, edit, and censor themselves for you. There’s an impulse to give you an objectified form of myself: Doctor So-and-So, Expert in This-and-That. Personal savior for whatever neurosis du jour is occupying the attention spans of the desperate and lonely masses. Inspirational guru plucking wisdom from the ages and delivering it in digestible nuggets to hold you up as you carry yourself through these trying times. Untamed mystic calling out from the wilderness.
This is all marketing, you see? We’ve all grown up in a commercial, consumer culture, and as a result we instinctively think of ourselves as products to be packaged and sold. Objects.
And we think of other people as objects, too. To be consumed, or rejected.
Digital Pirate Utopias
I think I was around 13 years old when I first read about the world wide web in Wired magazine. I’d been using Usenet — the progenitor of something like Reddit — for a while, and played around with gopher a bit, so I downloaded the very first public version of Netscape and glimpsed the near future at speeds of 2400 baud.
At that time, the idea of being able to read something published from anywhere in the world, and updated in real time, was revolutionary.
I put up my own first home page shortly after — I don’t even remember how I hosted it. It was no significant cultural artifact, nothing I even have backups for. It was crude and silly and contained mostly links to jokes and smut. It was just a way of sharing with friends.
As my tastes and the web itself both evolved, there were several other blogs. Some even had a few regular commenters, whose blogs I also started following. This early era of online connections felt incredible. Anyone who wanted a platform could have one. You could put your thoughts out there into the ether, and anyone on your wavelength could connect with you.
Social media accelerated this, drawing in more real-life friends while making it easy to connect with new friends around the world. Everyone was hyper-creative, friendly. Even your breakfast took on the air of artistic revelation; you couldn’t wait to share it all. You couldn’t wait to see what everyone was up to. It was as if the community feeling lost in the industrialized sprawl of modern life had suddenly been restored. Your tribe was everywhere.
Enshittification
Slowly, things changed. The early adopters, it turned out, were an entirely different breed than the later arrivals. The level of discourse began to recede toward the lowest common denominator, algorithms started to steer toward monetizable content, information overload took hold. Ideas gave way to memes. Writing gave way to “sharing.”
We all kept chugging along with it for a while as if it were still the same, rewarded by the occasional slot machine reinforcement of seeing a friend’s cherished moment, latest poem, silly musing, housecat photo shoot. Addiction to the socio-political rage machine would come in waves, stoked by everlasting distant connections to middling people who would never have been a part of your life without the technology that none of us quite knew how to use yet at the time of meeting, and by massive data-driven efforts of multinational megacorporations pushing an agenda of relentless enshittification.
The platform disappeared. The tribe disappeared. Hyper-politicization became the norm, with every aspect of daily life transformed into a statement on the morality of the participant. The open space in which we once ran free became the killing fields of normies in Puritan hats wielding religiosity and patriotism in the right hand and social justice in the left. So, you just had to keep more and more to yourself.
It was the suburbanization of the digital space. What the hell would Timothy Leary, who suggested that “the PC is the LSD of the ‘90s,” have to say about this?
Many, like me, retreated to solitude. Out of the cities and back to the farmland to connect with the simplicity of our true nature. We swore off the ridiculous political circus, the hustle and grind of curating your own brand, and the endless stream of senseless mind-polluting “content,” and began to re-engage with the swirling, wiggling process of living. It was painful at first. Lonely. And then… peaceful.
But the creative impulse always revives itself. Life… uh… finds a way.
Ego Death in the Academy
That cultural shift taking place online was also with me in other areas of life. From 2005–2012 I was in a doctoral program for clinical psychology, having a personal experience that mirrored the collective trauma of losing each other.
As a fairly schizoid character, my approach to people tends to be genuinely open and apolitical, often to the point of naivety. I have no natural appreciation of authority, and question everything not as an interpersonal slight but simply in the course of making sense of the world.
For me, writing has always been centrally important—a way of collecting my thoughts and connecting with others. Life is a never-ending mystery, and exploring ideas together feels like a much truer, more intimate connection than sharing the details of our lives. My thought process is shaped by my experiences, yes, but I could tell the whole story of my life without revealing the most important aspects of who I am now. Who I am is not where I’ve been, but how I relate.
When these imaginative dynamics met the narcissistic strivings of psychology professors, it often provoked outrage and targeting. Some day I’ll regale you with stories about my yearly Hogwart’s-esque boss battles at the old Adler School: the unhinged dean who screamed at staff and tried to railroad me out of the place for questioning a program change that would cost me an extra six months of schooling; the red-eyed African shaman who claimed I was a demon he would exorcise from the profession of psychology; the clinical supervisor who demanded honesty and then reliably punished for it; the high-born Indian woman whose need for deference extended to unquestioning acceptance of nonsense grading policies; the casual firing of my dissertation chair and his replacement with a literal sexual sadist who demanded an entirely new dissertation be written.
Underneath these personal conflicts was the general academic ethos of the time, that free thought is discouraged. It was drilled into me that original ideas are worthless; only citations matter. Everything written needed to carry the validation of having already been demonstrated — ideally by scientific studies, but at least by the logic and insight of someone whose voice mattered, as demonstrated by “peer review,” that process by which academics produce consensus reality by gatekeeping ideas through the perspectives of those already possessing institutional authority.
And so, years of chipping away at my sense of safety and confidence made me gradually stop writing anything but defensible, professional text. Writing — once a lifeline for me — was reduced to synthesizing the thoughts of others, until it dried up entirely.
All of this unfolded within a broader cultural context in which thinking, speaking, and writing were becoming increasingly dangerous. The things you say may be analyzed, misunderstood, taken out of context, used against you. My central means for making sense of life and connecting with others was gradually cleaved apart. I became a ghost of myself.
I think many of us did, while barely realizing it. It’s more dangerous than ever to be yourself, and easier than ever to believe you are the concepts that you’re being told you are.
Intersubjectivity, Selfhood, and Civilization
Why should this be? Why can’t we trust our own cultures, our own minds? The key, I think, is recognizing who and what “you” actually are.
A nice place to begin is with the idea of intersubjectivity. This is a concept from attachment research in psychology, which is an offshoot of psychoanalysis that studies the ways that we come to know ourselves and our world through our early relationships.
When you’re born into this world, you have no frame of reference, you have no expectations, you have no skills, not even the ability to recognize or use your own body. And so everything about your knowledge of self comes from what is mirrored back to you by those who can see you — your caregivers, your attachment figures, the people who you rely on for survival. They help you make sense out of the raw data coming in from your senses about your limbs and about the inner sensations, what they mean. And they show you what you must be in order to have a place in their world.
Baby smiles and mother smiles. Baby gets scared and mother makes a scared face. Little by little, the game intensifies and becomes more collaborative and more complex. This new human becomes a person by knowing themselves in the mind of another.
This intersubjectivity, or shared experiencing, is key to our survival as social animals. It is the underpinning of our emotional life, and the basis for the sense of identity we experience as a felt reality.
Cultural Coherence and Disintegration
Those intersubjective connections facilitate the co-creation of culture — a shared worldview, or consensus reality. Early human societies were highly coherent: From the moment you were born, you received consistent messages about who you were, what you were a part of, and what your role in the system was going to be. People in such cultures experience very little of the anxiety and internal conflict that modern people face as a result of navigating competing demands.
The development of modern civilization created situations where people have increasing options, opportunities, and demands. Large cities create a world where you can discover your potentials and manifest them, and find others who support you in your vision of what your self will be. We self-select into subcultures in order to find our place in the world, rather than having one offered to us. The movement toward online communication amplified this fragmentation, creating a paradox of choice — when we are given too many options to choose from, we tend to end up less satisfied than if we had fewer options to choose from.
Ideally, the opportunity to contact a variety of interesting worldviews would enrich us all, providing a broader view of what it means to be human as the basis for more intimate connections.
Unfortunately, as mammals, our desire for territory and dominance and certainty tends to override these types of ideals. When we see other people living and thinking in ways that mismatch our own, it’s experienced as a threat. We are protective of our own cultural conditioning and suspicious of outsiders. When I see someone with a different perspective expressing a different way of being, the natural response is to think that one of us must be wrong.
We crave coherence, and seek connection with those who see the world the way that we see it, because seeing yourself in another confirms your own existence. Seeing another way of thinking and being presents a challenge to the naturalness of your own. One of us is an abomination and has to go.
Because without intersubjectivity, we start to lose our reflective function — the ability to consider that our experiences have meaning, that our motivations are opaque to us, that we can look into our minds as witnesses to a process much greater than our conscious awareness, and pluck things out as artists, the way that a photographer plucks moments of beauty out of the flow of life. Instead, it starts to appear as though things are either true or false. We allow ourselves to believe that the world is knowable, even though in reality we can only ever know its shadow flickering against the inner wall of consciousness.
Understanding this interplay — the fundamental need for mirroring, the fragmentation of modern connections, the resulting identity fragility, and the loss of reflective capacity — helps us see why the digital landscape transformed. The early promise of connection, a balm for offline isolation, devolved into an ideological warzone precisely because our fractured, insecure selves desperately sought coherence. Lacking robust reflective function, the encounter with difference felt like an existential threat, amplified by platforms that rewarded engagement over understanding. The search for ‘finding ourselves in the mind of another’ twisted into clinging rigidly to conceptual identities and battling perceived abominations.
Return of the Repressed
And so, many have begun to return to the old ways. Personal blogs, RSS feeds, and email newsletters are all making comeback. Commenting and rating systems are disappearing from small websites — how soul-destroying to create an original essay and find the only metric your mind can evaluate it by is the number of ‘likes’ it received. As though the economy of scale had ever been a measure of quality.
The unique human skill of cumulative, intergenerational knowledge transfer — what Korzybski called “time-binding” — had always been a tool for breaking out of cultural bondage and touching the minds of those who could share some element of your personal soul. The invisible college is connected by thoughts, formed into words whispered across time and space.
When I write, it has never been to connect with the maximum number of people. It is to connect with the right people. It is to connect with myself.
Our culture expects you to create yourself as a kind of commodity: the sort of person others will see as beautiful, intelligent, successful, brave, interesting, unique, ideal. Doing so, however, is a joyless enterprise, because self is not something to be created but rather something to be discovered.
Our social environment has evolved toward an ethic of creating oneself as a commodity to be sold. And so we never find out who we really are.
And yet, the internet is now as public as could be. To write here is to broadcast for all who might want to harm you. And, in this age of division, anyone who finds themselves disagreeing with some slapdash idea formulated in the dark hours as an exercise in self-realization — perhaps the current reader — could in effect be awakened as a sleeper assassin. At any moment you may find yourself motivated by righteous anger to launch some online campaign to destroy me. It’s happened before!
And so I increasingly consider what it means for a someone like me, whose central preoccupations are philosophical, to be “thinking in public” these days.
It is a necessary danger. It is an exercise in non-dualism. It is a reminder to myself to abandon the endless stream of empty-calorie content this world has on offer, and seek the depths where the water runs cold and the hands of the profane cannot easily reach.
I hope to help you find yourself in my mind as I find myself in yours. This material is not for everyone. This is just for you — the person who can already connect in some degree, the neophile, the outsider — so that we can discover each other as we explore the depths of our consciousness.
As Timothy Leary said:
Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”
Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.