The Algorithmic Self: Feeling Trapped in my Feeds

posted on: May 14, 2025

Everything I consume has all started to look the same. It all sounds the same. It’s the same topics being analyzed over and over and over again.

The budding technocracy. Why we should return to physical media. The allure of nostalgia. How misogyny is running rampant. Capitalism and our societal structures are to blame. Reagan created this mess. Carrie Bradshaw and Rory Gilmore are annoying. AI slop. White feminism. The internet isn’t fun anymore. Shoegaze resurgence. Convenience culture.

I have a friend who posted a 10 minute long rant about how they despise the depiction of Irish and Scottish vampires. I saw someone else post a long list of trends they observe to be connected to the supposed male loneliness epidemic. I looked through these things, and I felt like I have not had a unique thought in some time. Do you know how devastating that feels?

The algorithm is in my head. My thoughts mirror the very content these apps shove towards me, spoon after spoon, infinite servings. There is no care or regard for the last piece that I have consumed, it’s constantly feeding me more, endless combinations of what it thinks interests me. There is always something left to be desired.

I fear that my brain has fallen into this trap of algorithmic thinking. I feel trapped within these echo chambers, repeating not only ideas but feelings I didn’t even generate myself.

Even my music is becoming repetitive and stale. Sometimes I wonder if I have just found all of the music I’ll like. I know this is a ridiculous thought, but I’m stuck on these loops that are perpetrated by the apps. The Spotify algorithm might be the worst of them all, and I’ve known this for years. I can predict what songs will play after a certain one, I know that the shuffle is never a true shuffle.

We are realizing the misery technological progression brings about. We have for years – as a teenager I would roll my eyes anytime social media and depression was addressed. I rolled my eyes because I knew it was true and I wanted to ignore it. The hyper-consumerism, the age of distraction, the emotional exploitation with every scroll: it’s changing how we think, how we can think.

Our primitive instincts are being exploited. We distract ourselves from emotion only to feel it more intensely through our screens—engaging with it in increasingly toxic ways. It’s a paradox of the algorithm. We continue to consume the same things, the algorithm learns and has a neverending stream of our interests. It’s quite gluttonous, really.

I want to break out of these echochambers.

It has been nearly a year since I completed my undergrad, and I am desperately yearning for the classroom because of the material and people I was surrounded by. There was always a new mode of thinking, a reading that broke my brain and would take me hours or days to comprehend. The concepts and readings from my classes would have never been suggested by algorithms. I miss these mental challenges. And it is upsetting that these challenges and conversations are tied to the privilege of these walls, hidden within the ivory covered tower.

On the last day of my political economy seminar, the class in which you write the senior thesis, we addressed this. Dr. Hunter said that we will look back to the college and think of the conversations and we may not find a space like this again. My best friend scoffed at this, irked by the pretention of assuming that the people we encounter everyday won’t engage with us as academics do. It has been almost a year, and I have yet to find a space like that again.

Those spaces are antithetical to algorithms and they inherently fight against this digital brainrot. But they aren’t accessible to all unfortunately. We must cultivate and nurture the curiosity that we have had in classrooms. It demands effort and creates friction.

A few weeks ago I found this guy on YouTube who posted videos of his life as a train-hopping vagabond, showing viewers the reality of relying on freight trains to travel and the gritty lifestyle. He played piano and used his own music for the videos. The camera would pan away from the trains to show us the terrain and the landscapes, an element of amateur cinematography. I watched most of his videos within days, captivated by his life and curious for more. There was such an earnestness to his content and how he created his videos. Unfortunately, he did die on a set of train tracks, doing what he loved at least.

But I was so excited about his content, I hadn’t felt that intrigued by a creator in a while. I came across him when I was going down the rabbithole of train-hopping. Not fed, not influenced.

To break from these echochambers, we need to be curious. We need to be going down rabbitholes. I get excited anytime I decide to go down a path and read about something random. We need to be cultivating spaces for more advanced conversations. We need to stretch our minds like muscles – to resist the ease of the algorithm.

(Some might read this and think I need to touch grass, which of course I do, we all do. But I want to see more discourse about algorithmic thinking in the sense that algorithms limit unique and original thought. This should scare us.)