Who's driving this thing, anyway?

I grew up in the 90s in New Jersey, and I was a kid, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt. But I remember a texture to daily life that I don't know how to find anymore.

The barber knew my family. Not in a customer-loyalty-program way. He just knew us. The dentist asked my mom about her garden and meant it. The landlord lived in the building. These people were not curated. Half of them were annoying. Some of them were genuinely difficult. But you couldn't avoid them, and that inability to avoid them was doing something important that nobody appreciated at the time. It was building a world small enough to see the edges of. And inside a world that small, people just talked. Not about anything in particular. The weather, someone's kid, a complaint about the Giants that had been running on a loop since September. Bullshitting. Conversation for the sake of conversation, which sounds unremarkable until you realize how rare it's become.

I'm 30 now and the thing I notice most is that almost nobody talks about what they actually think. Not because people lack depth. People are deep. But the raw material for conversation has been pre-processed. The takes arrive pre-formed. You're at dinner and someone brings up the economy and within thirty seconds five people are trading headlines they consumed that morning, and nobody is saying what they believe, because the act of passing headlines along has started to feel like thinking. It is not thinking. It's circulation. And what gets lost in all that circulation is the slow, unstructured, genuinely boring process of sitting with someone and working out what you actually believe about something. That's what the barber was. That's what the backseat of the car was on a long drive with nothing to do. Dead air that turned into real talk because there was nothing competing for the silence.

The silence is gone now. That's not a technology complaint, or it's not only that. It's a complaint about what fills the space when the silence disappears. Americans wagered $150 billion on sports last year from their couches. OnlyFans processed over $7 billion in payments, and the average creator made $131 a month, which tells you everything about who that system is actually built for. The simulation of intimacy is ten dollars a month. The simulation of risk is an app on your phone. The simulation of community is a group chat that pings all day and leaves you emptier than before. None of these things are fringe. They're the ordinary texture of a Tuesday night for millions of people. And the cumulative effect isn't any single addiction or distortion. It's a slow drift in what feels normal. What a relationship is supposed to cost. What ambition is supposed to look like. What connection even means when most of your interactions happen through a screen optimizing for something other than your wellbeing.

The Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic two years ago. People my age are the loneliest demographic in the country. That should be a five-alarm fire. Instead it's a fact that everyone knows and nobody does anything about. Which is sort of the pattern with everything right now.

Because this same drift is happening with work, and it's the one I find hardest to talk about clearly.

A couple years ago I started using AI the way most people did. It cleaned up a blog post. It helped me draft an email. A tool with obvious edges. I could see where it started and I stopped.

What I can do now does not have obvious edges. I build things in hours that would have taken weeks. The tools produce work I could not have produced alone, and the pace is compounding month over month in a way that makes the version from six months ago look like a toy. There are people using this cynically, flooding every channel with generated noise and calling it output. There are people using it honestly, watching the ground shift with clear eyes and adjusting. And there are people who haven't been touched yet, who still think this is about chatbots, and they're the ones I worry about most. The displacement is already showing up in entry-level roles and specific occupations. It's not going to announce itself. It's going to arrive the way everything else has. Gradually, normalized before it's understood.

And underneath all of it is the fact that the people and institutions above us, the ones who are supposed to be navigating this, have completely burned through whatever trust they had left. This isn't a partisan point. Campaign promises bear almost no resemblance to what gets executed, and this is true regardless of which team you voted for. Executives make decisions that serve a stock price and dress them in the language of purpose. Something like the Epstein files gets teased as a reckoning and delivered as a footnote. And it moves so fast now, the cycle from revelation to spin to collective amnesia, that consequences barely land before the next thing arrives. At a certain point the most rational response is to just stop paying attention. Not out of apathy. Out of self-preservation. Because the alternative is investing emotional energy in a system that has made it very clear, over and over, that it does not care about you.

So. Nobody's driving this thing. The algorithms optimize for engagement. The platforms optimize for revenue. The institutions optimize for survival. None of these systems were designed to ask whether you're lonely or addicted or employable, and they don't. They've outgrown the people who built them. They run on their own logic now. And waiting for someone to fix this from the top is like sitting in the backseat of a car with no driver, hoping the highway will steer itself.

But here's what I keep coming back to, and it's the reason I started with New Jersey and the barber and all that sentimental stuff. Those little worlds worked. Not because they were perfect. Because they were small. One room, a few people, nothing to do but be there. The magic wasn't the community. The magic was the scale. And that scale is still available. It just requires you to build it on purpose now, which is harder than stumbling into it by default, but it is entirely within reach.

The people I know who seem the least lost right now are not the ones with better information or sharper takes on where things are headed. They're the ones who've gotten intentional about keeping things small. Same place on the same night. The real conversation instead of the text thread. Letting the silence sit long enough for it to turn into something. They've rebuilt what I remember from growing up, except consciously, knowing what they're protecting and why.

Nobody's going to fix the feed or the algorithms or the trust deficit from the top down. That's the reality and I think it's worth seeing clearly. But the barbershop was never a macro solution. It was a room. And the room still works. You just have to show up.