Picture this: A woman in her thirties, lying on her living room carpet at noon, still in pajamas, no bra, no plan, conducting a very thorough archaeological study of a stain that may or may not have been from 2017. She's been scrolling Instagram for three hours looking at a surfer from Australia, studying her hair the way art historians study the Mona Lisa. Not because she wants to be a surfer—she gets seasick in bathtubs—but because somewhere between the third cappuccino and the hundredth comparison, she decided: "If I just looked like her, everything would make sense."

Better Filters, Same Existential Crisis

She’s unemployed (well, freelancing—which is just “unemployed” with better Instagram captions), feels like a financial parasite to her husband, and has somehow convinced herself that the solution to an existential crisis is hair highlights. Bad highlights. Tiger-striped highlights. The kind that make you look like you lost a fight with a box of cheap bleach.

Yeah. That was me.

How to Manufacture Desire

Here’s the irony that would be funny if it wasn’t so depressing: For ten years, I was literally one of the architects of your addiction. I worked for almost all types of blue-chip internationals out there. Award-winning campaigns that taught millions of people to want things they didn’t need. I knew the psychology—the exact millisecond of dopamine, the vulnerability in human nature I could exploit, the difference between what you actually wanted and what I could convince you to want.

I was so good at it, I even convinced myself I was helping.

And then, one morning, I realized I had become just another user lost in the feed I helped build.

Performing a Life Instead of Living One

Every notification was a small obligation. Every feed was proof I was failing. I had 1,247 “friends” and couldn’t name five people who actually knew me. I had infinite options and couldn’t choose what to eat for dinner. I was performing myself to an invisible audience 24/7 and had absolutely no idea who the main character actually was.

Logging Out Wasn’t a Grand Awakening

So one day—not dramatically, just… tiredly—I stopped. I logged out. 28 days. No Instagram, no Twitter, no cable news, no endless scrolling, no performance.

Nothing.

Just me, a lot of coffee, and the slow horror of discovering I had no idea
who I was when nobody was watching.