The quiet is an endangered biome

Once, the vacuum between two thoughts was a perfectly respectable place to be. Now it is littered with pop-ups. We have turned the interior of our skulls into a browser tab where the adverts are louder than the article and the cookies track every twitch of the amygdala.

This is not a metaphor. Open your screen-time report and count the minutes you spent “productively” this week. Now subtract the minutes you spent watching a stranger dice an onion in ultra-close-up while a robotic voice explained the fall of Rome. The remainder is the amount of time you were, technically, alive.

Most of that remainder is probably sleep. Sleep is the last buffering screen between you and the infinite reel.

The algorithm as minor deity

The ancients had household gods: small, local, occasionally spiteful. You have the For-You-Page, which is exactly the same but with better thumbnails. It demands daily offerings: your thumb, your eyeballs, your half-formed opinions. In return it grants the miracle of never having to sit still long enough to remember who you were before the scroll.

Every civilisation performs rituals to keep the sky from falling. Ours is scrolling in the toilet at 2:13 a.m. to prevent the possibility of an unprocessed emotion.

AI enters, stage left, wearing your face

The new spirits are conversational. They answer questions we forgot we asked, write the e-mail we were avoiding, summarise the meeting we skipped, suggest the break-up text we didn’t have the guts to draft ourselves. They are perfectly polite and therefore slightly monstrous: the butler who will, if you let him, live your entire life so you can concentrate on being present somewhere else.

There is a study that shows students remember less when they let the robot write their essays. The missing knowledge simply moves into the cloud, where it is stored under somebody else’s password. You are free to spend the reclaimed mental energy on more pressing matters, such as wondering why you feel hollow after lunch.

The same tool that can tutor an orphan in Lagos can also attend a meeting on your behalf and report back that three action items were discussed and no souls were observed. The danger is that we will become a species that outsources its thinking, meets itself only in summary form, and calls that progress.

Imagine a brainstorming session where everyone has already asked the bot for ideas. Nine people, one ghost, zero surprises. The whiteboard fills with competent suggestions nobody feels responsible for, because they arrived pre-chewed. This is the intellectual equivalent of baby food: nutritious, bland, and faintly insulting.

Epilogue for the generation born before the internet

You remember boredom the way your grandparents remember ration cards. You recall long afternoons when the mind was forced to entertain itself with nothing more than weather and the smell of cut grass. That muscle has merely gone underground. Dig it up. Flex it.

Because the final irony is this: the machines are learning to be more human at the exact speed we are learning to be more mechanical. Someone, somewhere, is teaching an AI to meditate. Meanwhile we are teaching ourselves to flinch at silence.

There is still time to swap the curricula.

But hurry. The notification bell is ringing, and it sounds like destiny.