Dark Screenshots of the Soul

Your Feed is building you too

You trade a part of yourself to any media you consume.

Every tweet, post, film, email, tiktok, podcast, short, essay, reel, speech, and meme claims a fraction of your limited daily attention.

In exchange for this ceded mental territory and the caloric cost of a thumb swipe, you receive a few million neurons’ worth of dopamine and conviction.

Altogether, this consumption (alongside any other deliberate inner work you do) amounts to your whole effort at self-change and self-validation.

This means that while the content you love doesn’t love you back… it does shape you. It fills in the overlooked nooks and crannies of your consciousness. Post after post stacks together to spackle and smooth, and, with enough time and latitude, eventually builds machines and monuments to their ideas inside the structures of your mind.

These machines might align with what you value, but, if you don’t shape them consciously, they probably won’t. Either way, with enough time and attention (the only construction budget that matters) you will eventually hold whatever they stand for dear.

If not in your heart, then at least with your reactive feelings and actions.

How else could it turn out if that’s the only machine you’ve built to face the world?

In this way, everything you consume takes a watermarked screenshot of your whole Self.

Consumption saves the Thing, your reaction to the Thing, and your psychic act of re-establishing a self-consistent worldview in response to what the Thing just did to you.

And if you save an idea enough times, it’ll eventually become the easiest one to accept.

As any ZIRP-era company culture consultant will tell you:

“People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

As the screenshots pile up inside yourself, your body remembers too.