YouTube: Algorithmic Misanthropy

The feed keeps trying to teach me that power is something you copy from people who already have too much of it. The platform pushes one rhythm: admire wealth, follow dominance, narrow yourself until you match the beat it rewards. But nothing alive survives by doing that. Identity only holds together when it keeps a little space of its own — a slight difference that stops it being swallowed by whatever surrounds it. These billionaire-lifestyle clips and “how to win” lectures push everyone into the same groove, leaving no room for that difference. What they call success is just a shiny surface held up by shifting the mess it creates onto everyone else.

The deeper irritation is that this story gets the basics of life wrong. Anything that lasts — families, communities, ecosystems, even a single person’s sense of self — survives because it carries tension, contrast, and a bit of healthy disagreement inside itself. Remove that, and the thing collapses. The wealth-worship narrative pretends it can cut all that out and still stay whole. It can’t. The result is a polished image that hides its own strain, and that strain doesn’t vanish — it spreads. You can feel it in the wider mood of the place, in the way people begin to fray at the edges. When a platform amplifies this kind of story long enough, it tries to pull everyone into a single way of thinking, one that can’t make sense of the very world it depends on. The discomfort you feel is simply the mind recognising that pressure — the moment when something living refuses to organise itself around an idea too small to hold the reality that keeps it alive.