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.