Clarity in the Age of Algorithms

“The price of civilization is neurosis.” - Carl Jung 

We keep saying things are getting worse. 

That the world is more chaotic, more fractured, more fake than ever. 

But I don’t think that’s quite accurate.

What we’re experiencing is a loss of insulation - a dropping away of the illusion that the future would reward stability with more stability.

We’re in the age of algorithms - where every impulse is tracked and reflected back to us in distorted form. 

We know way too much about what everyone else is thinking!

We scroll through the entire archive of human civilization before breakfast. 

We were not built for this much input.

Algorithms isolate us into feedback loops that feel like reality, then make us wonder if we’re losing our minds. It’s chaos!

But chaos isn’t the exception. It’s the baseline. 

The myth that things were ever stable, orderly, or under control is a privilege of modernity. 

As if we were “over” surviving ourselves. 

As if we didn’t build cities on tectonic faults, economies on debt, and digital lives on surveillance engines. 

What’s crumbling isn’t reality - it’s the fantasy that we’d transcended our nature.

Jung suggested that civilization itself produces neurosis: the repression of instinct, the denial of death, the demand that we stay composed while the unconscious roils underneath. 

In many ways, this moment - glitchy, overwhelming, unspeakably strange - is a reckoning with that repression. 

The veils are lifting. We’re not more broken than we used to be - we’re just closer to the surface of things.

I think this is why so many people feel foggy, disoriented, and unmoored. 

Not because we’re descending into madness, but because we’re waking up inside a long-delayed honesty. 

It’s disorienting to live in a time where the stakes are exposed, the violence isn’t outsourced, and the contradictions are harder to rationalize away. 

But there’s also something clarifying in it. Something that reminds me I’m alive. Reminder: YOU ARE ALIVE RIGHT NOW.

The phone doesn’t cause the chaos - it accelerates our encounter with it. 

AI doesn’t invent unreality - it exaggerates the one we’ve built. 

We are not being ruined by the times. We’re being revealed by them.

And maybe that’s the work now. 

Not to restore a vanished normal, but to develop the capacity to live without the anesthesia. 

To be here, in this jagged, breathless moment, and not look away. 

Not to transcend our primate instincts, but to see them clearly, and choose differently.

The world has always been like this. 

Violent and beautiful. Terrible and tender. 

But maybe now, finally, it’s honest. 

And maybe, beneath the noise, we are too.

Loneliness Is Not a Symptom. It’s a Signal.

We’re told we’re in a loneliness epidemic - as if loneliness were a virus we caught from too much time alone.

But loneliness isn’t new. And it isn’t a flaw.

It’s a deeply human response to disconnection - from others, but also from ourselves.

There’s a kind of loneliness no amount of scrolling can touch.

It arrives quietly - between sips of tea, on the drive home, just after the book ends.

It’s not about being alone. It’s about a lack of resonance.

The sense that no one is quite with you, even when they’re around.

In a world built to distract you from yourself, that feeling gets labeled pathological.

But it’s not a symptom. It’s a signal.

Biologically, loneliness is a distress call. A primal urge for reconnection. 

The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between emotional isolation and physical threat - the brain codes both as danger. 

That tightening in your chest? It’s your body asking: Where is my pack?

Wolves howl to locate each other. 

A lone wolf isn’t powerful. It’s at risk.

Many of us are living like lone wolves now. 

Not by choice, but by design - cut off by culture, by trauma, by algorithms that replace communion with commentary.

In therapy, I often hear:

“I shouldn’t feel this lonely. I have people.”
“I don’t belong anywhere.”
“I can’t tell who I am when I’m with others.”

These aren’t just clinical patterns. They’re deep human truths.

We live in a culture that prizes performance over presence.

That mistakes constant contact for true connection.

So when loneliness shows up, it may not mean something’s wrong.

It may mean you’re coming into contact with what matters.

Loneliness often signals the end of pretending.

The point where performance gives way to longing.

Where the need for something real outweighs the comfort of the familiar.

That you're ready to be met, not just mirrored.

To connect, not just to cope.

That’s a good place to start. 

You’re Not Broken. You’re Becoming.

One of the best things you can do for the health of your plant is to stress it out. In order to be healthy, the plant must suffer at times.

Suffering grows humans too.

I’m not on TikTok or Instagram, but if those platforms are anything like they were when I left - there are still plenty of people hawking the Secret to Wholeness™.

There is no secret. But there is a trick. I’ll get to that.

There is no such thing as wholeness. Wholeness is a product sold by the health and wellness industry meant to make you feel you are broken and that the $79 pack of adaptogenic whatevers is JUST the thing to cure you of your malaise. Your ills. Your fatal flaws. 

There is growth, or there is death. And growth is stressful. And growth is ultimately fatal - all things must pass. 

Gardeners know the secret to a healthy bloom in springtime is to stress the fuck out of the plant coming out of dormancy. A plant’s natural lifecycle is one of dormancy, stress, growth, bloom, and decay. Each phase as necessary as the last.

As a psychotherapist I have seen many people who just want the quick fix answer to all that ails them (uh, me too). As a psychoanalytic scholar, and veritable expert on all strain of existential crisis I’m here to tell you that the best of us suffer intensely. 

The trick is - recognizing when you cannot hold it all on your own, and asking for help before suffering becomes your identity. 

The goal of therapy is not to disappear the pain, but rather, to so well-callous the hand that holds the pain, that suddenly the red-hot thing (traumatic memory, root pain, primal fear) is able to be held - and understood.

It’s only by going over and over and over again the painful bits… building up tolerance and consciousness… experiencing stressful growth bit by bit - that we earn the ability to move more consciously in our lives. To not be governed by the inner destructive forces that would keep us suffering in the dark.

That we finally earn our peace.

Gender Isn’t a Problem to Solve

The political arena in America has more in common with the failed spectacle of the Arena Football League than with the serious business of running government. So trust me when I say - I’m not here to contend with your belief system around who should and should not be in power. That’s for a political science geek, I’m a psychology geek.

But I am writing about power. 

Power thrives in the otherwise sick soil of grandiosity and narcissism.

Narcissism feeds on rigidity. It leaves no room for nuance, for contradiction, for anyone else's experience. That’s how we arrive at the grotesque notion that Transwomen are just men in dresses, or that Transmen are failed dykes… or whatever the hate-speech catch of the day is.

Narcissists have no room for anything other than their own impressions, senses of themselves - they are rigid, and they are terrified, and they certainly make interesting patients.

Let’s touch some grass, and sink into our human roots for a moment:

Banana Slugs: No hierarchy, no gods, no masters

Banana slugs are hermaphroditic. Each slug possesses both male and female reproductive organs. When two slugs mate, both can fertilize and be fertilized, often simultaneously.

Willow Trees: Gender is seasonal

Some willow species can switch between producing male and female flowers from year to year. They're known as labile in sex expression - meaning gendered traits aren’t fixed, even within the same organism. For willow trees gender is not a core identity, but a fluid role.

Ancient Human Cultures: Gender non-conforming gods

The goddess Inanna was worshipped in ancient Mesopotamia with priests who were assigned male at birth but lived as women - early examples of institutionalized gender fluidity within religious systems. Divinity made space for complexity. Gender was mystical, not medical.

How can you argue with nature? Human nature? The nature of the gods? 

You could try to of course. Millions do. An army of narcissists shaking their terrified fists from their porches saying, “There’s only two genders!”, isn’t just pathetic, it’s inaccurate. 

There are not only two genders. 

There is only one reality - and that reality contains multitudes.