We Are Lost Inside the Mentalluvium

We are staggering through an unprecedented fugue state—an acute disorientation born of our immersion in the social media Chumstream, a digital shark tank where recycled outrage, trauma bait, and influencer chum swirl together in a frothy, click-hungry frenzy. It’s not a stream so much as a bloody whirlpool, designed to keep us circling, feeding, and forgetting.

Gurwinder Bhogal, a rare voice of reason in this algorithmic carnival, broke it down on Josh Szeps’ Uncomfortable Conversations. Social media, he said, isn’t just addictive—it’s engineered by tech lords who know exactly how to hijack your brain. Blue light. Intermittent dopamine rewards. Infinite scroll. Welcome to the digital casino, a neon maze with no clocks, no windows, and no exits—only flashing notifications and the creeping sense that your life is being siphoned off one swipe at a time.

In this fever swamp of the self, people aren’t just bored—they’re bloated. Stuffed with half-digested TED Talk wisdom, viral symptom checklists, and influencer pathology. They gorge on intellectual junk food and, as Bhogal put it, suffer from “intellectual obesity.” Diagnoses become identities, and confusion is recast as empowerment. It’s not that they have ADHD, long Covid, autism, or gender dysmorphia—it’s that they scroll into them, self-diagnosing in real time, latching onto whatever trending malaise grants them a fleeting sense of belonging in the void.

These are not charlatans. These are casualties. Belief becomes ballast in a digital landscape where nothing is anchored. They wander through the cognitive casino, zombified, dislocated, convinced that a diagnostic label is the same as self-knowledge, and that performative suffering is the highest form of authenticity.

What we’re experiencing isn’t just burnout. It’s Mentalluvium—the psychic sludge left behind after gorging on content. It’s the mental silt of endless scrolling: micro-identities, algorithm-approved neuroses, and dopamine-smeared fragments of truth. We are not thinking. We are sedimenting.

If this is hell, it didn’t come with flames. It came with filters.