Every Man Is An Island

I saw a tweet earlier today. Some kid had posted a picture of his supplement stack. Rows of neatly arranged bottles, vitamins, amino acids, nootropics, something for gut health, something for performance. Someone had commented: “All this to be able to make eye contact with a woman.”

He was right. Completely right.

But, of course, this is no longer a world where men and women look at each other. They don’t have to. They have screens for that. The necessity of human interaction has been replaced with profiles, algorithms, filters, entire systems designed to ensure that no one will ever have to feel the discomfort of an unscripted moment again. Every potential connection is screened in advance, assessed for viability, optimized for efficiency. No energy is wasted on the wrong kind of person, the wrong kind of conversation, the wrong kind of life.

Naturally, this means no one meets anyone anymore.

It’s easy enough to observe. Everyday I sit in one of these gay little cafés, order my coffee, watch the people around me. Everyone is staring at a screen, their faces illuminated by the glow of their own little worlds. They scroll, they type, they pretend to work. The idea of acknowledging the person sharing the table with them has become as absurd as writing a letter by hand or knocking on a neighbour’s door.

Because people do not know their neighbours. People do not want to know their neighbours. The thought is foreign to them. They would rather die than experience an unplanned conversation. They select their interactions with the same precision with which they select their food: organic, ethically sourced, free of any element that might cause discomfort.

The result is a society without texture, without warmth, without accident.

Serendipity has died, and with it, the last remnants of human spontaneity. There are no chance encounters, no unexpected conversations, no passing moments of recognition. Everything must be planned, everything must be controlled. The idea of simply allowing life to happen is now considered naïve, even dangerous.

People no longer collide. They sort. They curate. They eliminate variables.

And despite all of this, despite the endless fine-tuning of profiles, despite the careful elimination of risk, they are still alone. They are lonelier than ever. They have never been more alone.

They do not wonder why.

They do not look up.

Once people start refusing to connect with strangers laterally and even with those slightly below, a society is dead.

There is zero serendipity to be had on both the individual and collective level when everyone is only looking to connect with those fitting a certain profile.

It is not just love that is lost, though love is the most obvious casualty. Moments are lost. The simple joy of being recognized, of being part of something that is not just a transaction, is lost.

This is how a society atomizes. Not through war, not through crisis, but through the gradual erosion of the in-between spaces, the casual moments, the unstructured interactions that once filled the gaps of daily life.

A person alone in their apartment can convince themselves they are connected. They have apps, messages, curated feeds. They can consume an infinite amount of content, interact with an infinite number of profiles. But nothing real ever happens to them. They do not brush against another life. They do not see an expression that wasn’t meant for them. They do not speak without first rehearsing the words in their head.

Every connection is an abstraction. Every interaction is mediated by an interface.

Life is no longer happening. It is being managed.

No one even fights it.

They welcome it.

They prefer it this way.

No matter how much they say they wish it were different.

Society will continue its slow fade into silence. Not a dramatic collapse. Just a quiet, seamless disappearance of everything that once made life surprising, unpredictable, and alive.

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