Stop Blaming the Algorithm
People love to blame the algorithm for everything.
“My brain feels fried because of TikTok.”
“I can’t focus anymore because of Instagram.”
No. The algorithm isn’t the reason your brain feels like mashed potatoes. The truth is a little harder to swallow: you didn’t have a plan in the first place.
Every platform that has an algorithm also has a search bar. If you really knew what you wanted to find, you would’ve typed it in and found it. But you didn’t know. You were just scrolling. And blaming the algorithm feels nice because it lets you believe you were on some big mission to learn something… and the algorithm just pulled you off track. But honestly? There was no mission. If there was, you wouldn’t have been scrolling to begin with.
The algorithm didn’t kill your curiosity, it just exposed that you weren’t really curious to begin with.
That’s the real issue. The biggest barrier to understanding things isn’t lack of knowledge, it’s lack of curiosity. Big discoveries in history didn’t come from having all the answers. They came from asking new questions.
What if germs cause disease?
What if gravity bends light?
But now we think, “I don’t need school, I’ll just Google it. I’ll just ask AI.”
Yeah, okay. But school, at its best, doesn’t just give you answers. It shows you what questions are even worth asking. Because if you don’t know the right question, the best answer in the world is useless.
Without curiosity, you stop exploring. You stop thinking. You just… react. Engage. Scroll...
Think about what they even call it: "Feed". That’s what you give to livestock. You put anything in front of a pig, it’ll eat it. That’s not thinking, that’s just… consuming.
Look, I’m not saying we should all throw our phones in a river and read dusty old books (even though, let’s be real, that might help). But the least we can do is stop living on autopilot. Stop scrolling just to scroll. Use the search bar. Ask better questions.
Because the algorithm isn’t running your life. You are. Or at least, you should be.
