A child born in 2010 has never known a world without algorithmic feeds deciding what they see, hear, and desire before they can spell their own name. By the time they hit puberty, the smartphone in their pocket has already been through eight complete paradigm shifts, each one quietly rewriting the rules of friendship, attention, and self-worth. The quiet rituals that once anchored ordinary life (Saturday morning cartoons, land-line gossip, walking to the corner store without broadcasting the route) have been pureed into an always-on slurry of notifications, metrics, and performative identity. We wake up to a new social credit layer, a new payment rail, a new AI therapist, a new moral panic every 90 days, and we are expected to metabolize each mutation as if it were just another software update. The human nervous system, evolved for seasonal rhythms and village gossip, now vibrates at the frequency of server farms.

We still tell teenagers to “find themselves,” as though there exists a stable self to discover instead of an endlessly recompiling avatar whose value is measured in engagement seconds and whose future employability expires faster than milk. The old social script (study hard, pick a career, settle into a role, contribute to your community) collapses the moment the career you trained for is automated, the community scatters across Discord servers, and the very definition of “contribution” is rewritten by faceless recommendation engines. Anxiety, burnout, and the gnawing sense of being perpetually behind are not personal failures; they are the predictable physiological tax of trying to sprint on a treadmill that doubles its speed every year while promising that if you just optimize harder, you’ll finally reach the horizon.

The cruelest part is the illusion of agency. We are told we can opt out, log off, touch grass, yet the grass itself is now monetized, tracked, and gamified. The jobs, the healthcare, the dating pools, the news, the very calories we consume are gated behind platforms whose only commandment is accelerated extraction. There is no outside left to retreat to; there is only the tempo, rising like floodwater. Human beings are not failing to adapt; we are being adapted, continuously, involuntarily, at a pace no culture in history has ever survived intact. The loneliness, the rage, the spiritual hollowing, these are not bugs in the system. They are the exhaust fumes of a species caught inside an engine that was never built to carry souls.