Don’t Let Tech Drain the Life Out of Living

The best parts of life are messy. They refuse to follow scripts. They defy prediction. They explode past the dull constraints of data.

And Silicon Valley is a doomsday cult that keeps clawing at them, stripping away the raw, unpredictable joy of the human experience and replacing it with something smooth, sterile, and infernally dead eyed.

Streaming services generate playlists, so you don't have to curate your own music. AI writes poems so you don't have to wrestle with the written word. Dating apps optimize your matches to save you from fumbling through real-life conversations. Bots summarize meetings, texts and emails and soon enough our entire social lives are compressed into algorithmically-approved bullet points.

It's an easy pitch, on the surface. Who wouldn't want to eliminate the awkward, the uncertain, the inefficient?

But friction is where everything real happens. Struggle and uncertainty aren't flaws—they're the sole essence of what it means to be alive.

Creativity is exhilarating because it might fail. A joke makes you laugh because it catches you off guard. Love is profound because it isn't guaranteed. The moment a song hits your soul at just the right moment, through a mate's recommendation, a stranger's car radio, or a late-night bar you wandered into by accident — that isn't an algorithm nudging you into a dopamine loop. That’s life crashing into you, raw and unscripted.

Every time we outsource one of these experiences, it gets hollowed out. The words are still there; they sound the same, but the soul is gone. The efficiency rises, but the thrill dies out.

Our tools should serve us, not erase us. They should help us paint, not replace our hands. They should help us connect, not sterilize every interaction until it's nothing more than a controlled, meaningless transaction.

We don't need to automate the best parts of being human.

Some things are meant to be slow. Some things are meant to be clumsy.

That's the point.