Cinemorphosis

Tag: health

  • The Hunger Games: GLP-1, Free Will, and the Price of Thin

    The Hunger Games: GLP-1, Free Will, and the Price of Thin

    In my Critical Thinking course, we tackle three research-based essays that wrestle with one central, disquieting premise: technology is not just helping us live—it’s rewriting what it means to be human. Our first unit? A polite but pointed takedown of the American weight loss gospel. The assignment is called The Aesthetic Industrial Complex, and it asks students to write a 1,700-word argumentative essay exploring a question that’s fast becoming unavoidable: Does the old moral framework of discipline, kale, and “personal responsibility” still hold water in the age of GLP-1 injections, food-delivery algorithms, and weaponized Instagram bodies?

    We dive into the stories of good-faith dieters—folks who’ve counted calories, logged cardio, avoided sugar like it was plutonium—and still watched their doctors frown over charts lit up with prediabetes, high blood pressure, and the telltale signs of metabolic collapse. These are not cases of vanity. These are mandates from cardiologists and endocrinologists. Lose weight or lose time.

    Enter the needle. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy promise what decades of dieting books never delivered: chemical satiety and the end of food noise—that constant mental hum that turns the pantry into a siren song. The results are seismic: hunger down, weight down, cravings down, existential questions up.

    Because here’s the paradox: when food no longer seduces us, we gain a body that’s marketable and medically optimized—but we lose something else. Food is not just fuel. It’s ritual. It’s celebration. It’s Grandma’s lasagna, a first date over sushi, a kitchen filled with the smell of garlic. Food is culture, memory, and soul. And yet, being ruled by it? That’s a kind of servitude. Constant hunger is its own form of imprisonment.

    So we’re caught in a new paradox: to be free from food, we must become dependent on pharmacological salvation. Health insurers love it. Employers love it. Actuarial tables are singing hymns of praise. But should we?

    That’s the real assignment: not just whether GLP-1s work, but whether the shift they represent is something to embrace or fear. This is no clear-cut debate. It’s a riddle with contradictory truths. A tug-of-war between biology, economics, ethics, and the shrinking silhouette in the mirror.

    And if my students groan under the weight of the question, I remind them: this isn’t Home Ec. This is Critical Thinking. If you want easy answers, go back to diet TikTok.

  • Blessed Are the Gluten-Free: America’s New Spiritual Elite

    Blessed Are the Gluten-Free: America’s New Spiritual Elite

    Reading Amy Larocca’s How to Be Well is like watching Gwyneth Paltrow’s ghost possess a Whole Foods employee mid-mushroom latte. Her book is equal parts riveting and scalpel-sharp, dissecting the strange mutation of fashionistas who’ve traded in Gucci for goop and now drape themselves in wellness jargon like it’s couture. These wellness evangelists don’t just eat clean—they chant it. They speak in tongues made of spirulina, lipospheric vitamin C, Cordyceps, Shilajit resin, and ho shou wu, stringing together syllables like they’re summoning the ghost of Hippocrates.

    What we’re witnessing isn’t self-care—it’s a personality cult with better lighting. The modern wellness priestess has crowned herself a demigod, armed with adaptogens instead of sacraments, waving her magic tincture dropper and pointing lesser mortals toward the True Path of purified, gluten-free, unpasteurized transcendence. It’s not just health—it’s high-performance sanctimony.

    Larocca nails the diagnosis with surgical precision: “I sometimes think of wellness as the project of buying your own body back for yourself.” Translation? Welcome to America’s chicest hostage situation, where the ransom is payable in collagen peptides and oat milk. The goal is to become the luxury-branded version of you—perfect skin, toxin-free bowels, and moral superiority radiating from every overpriced yoga mat. The side effect? It magnifies the gaping inequalities of modern life like a magnifying mirror you didn’t ask to look into.

    Because let’s be honest: none of this comes cheap. These rituals of wellness cost money—bucketloads of it. We’re not talking about a jog around the park and some tap water. We’re talking $12 green juices and $300 infrared saunas. The entire project is rigged to serve the few while gaslighting the many. The wellness priestess doesn’t just ignore that her lifestyle is unattainable for most—she markets that inaccessibility as part of the charm.

    This isn’t health—it’s spiritual cosplay for the affluent.

  • College Essay Prompt That Addresses Food and Economic Class: Ozempification, AI, and the Class Divide in the End of Food Culture

    College Essay Prompt That Addresses Food and Economic Class: Ozempification, AI, and the Class Divide in the End of Food Culture

    Prompt Overview:
     As GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic suppress hunger and artificial intelligence tailors hyper-personalized, nutrient-optimized meals, our relationship with food is undergoing a radical transformation. But not all communities are experiencing this shift equally. While affluent professionals embrace biotech and AI to streamline their eating, working-class and immigrant communities often continue to practice food as culture, tradition, and emotional ritual.

    Your Task:
     Write an 8-paragraph argumentative essay that responds to the following claim:

    Claim:
     GLP-1 drugs and artificial intelligence are ending the traditional notion of food and eating as cultural, emotional, and communal experiences—but primarily for the educated upper-middle class, creating a new kind of class-based food divide.

    Instructions:

    1. Introduction (Paragraph 1):
       Open with a compelling hook. Present the claim and your thesis—whether you agree, disagree, or take a nuanced stance.
    2. Background (Paragraph 2):
       Briefly explain what GLP-1 drugs do and how AI is influencing food production and personalization. Introduce the concept of “Ozempification.”
    3. First Argument (Paragraph 3):
       Argue how the professional-managerial class is disproportionately embracing GLP-1 and AI technologies as part of a broader trend toward self-optimization.
    4. Second Argument (Paragraph 4):
       Show how this new model of eating—quantified, detached, and efficient—erodes traditional food practices like communal meals, emotional eating, or ritual cooking.
    5. Third Argument (Paragraph 5):
       Examine the contrasting experience of working-class and immigrant communities who, whether by choice or necessity, retain deeper connections to cultural food practices.
    6. Counterargument and Rebuttal (Paragraph 6):
       Acknowledge the argument that biotech and AI could democratize health and nutrition. Then challenge this by exploring accessibility, affordability, or cultural loss.
    7. Cultural Reflection (Paragraph 7):
       Reflect on the long-term cultural implications of this class-based divide. Will we see a future where the elite biohack their appetites while the working class clings to endangered food rituals?
    8. Conclusion (Paragraph 8):
       Reassert your thesis and end with a provocative insight, question, or forecast about the future of food and class.

    Source Requirement:
     Use at least 4 credible sources, including recent journalism, scholarly articles, or reports (2023 or later). Cite sources in MLA format.

    Suggested Angles to Explore:

    • How does Silicon Valley’s culture of optimization affect food rituals?
    • Is “Ozempification” a privilege or a necessity?
    • What happens when food stops being a shared story and becomes a solo algorithm?

    Here is a curated reading list for your revised prompt on Ozempification, AI, and the Class Divide in the End of Food Culture. These selections balance journalism, research, and cultural commentary, providing accessible and provocative sources for students at various reading levels:

    READING LIST

    1. Ozempic and GLP-1 Drugs

    • “Scientists Find Why Ozempic Changes the Types of Food People Eat”
       Prevention Magazine, 2024
      Explains how GLP-1 drugs alter appetite and food preferences.

    • “Ozempic’s Effect on Food Innovation”
       Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), May 2024
      Discusses how food manufacturers are shifting products in response to Ozempic-driven consumer changes.

    2. AI and the Personalization of Food

    • “AI-Driven Transformation in Food Manufacturing”
       Frontiers in Nutrition, 2025
      An in-depth research article on AI’s impact on food production, sustainability, and consumer targeting.
      PDF Download
    • “AI Is Hacking Your Hunger: How the Food Industry Engineers Addiction”
       Forbes, March 2025, by Jason Snyder
      A bold look at how AI and biotech are reprogramming consumer desire and food experience.

    3. Food, Class, and Culture

    • “The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools”
       By Jennifer E. Gaddis, University of California Press, 2019
      Offers a clear view of how food, labor, and class intersect in institutional settings like schools.
    • “Cultural Appropriation in Food: Is It a Problem?”
       The New York Times, by Ligaya Mishan
      Reflects on food, culture, and who gets to profit from culinary traditions—good for contrast with bioengineered food trends.
    • “You Can’t Eat Optimized Food with Your Grandma”
       The Atlantic, speculative title suggestion (hypothetical essay you might write or assign students to mimic stylistically)
      Encourages reflection on the emotional and generational disconnect caused by hyper-personalized, tech-driven diets.
  • The Death of Dinner: How AI Could Replace Pleasure Eating with Beige, Compliant Goo

    The Death of Dinner: How AI Could Replace Pleasure Eating with Beige, Compliant Goo

    Savor that croissant while you still can—flaky, buttery, criminally indulgent. In a few decades, it’ll be contraband nostalgia, recounted in hushed tones by grandparents who once lived in a time when bread still had a soul and cheese wasn’t “shelf-stable.” Because AI is coming for your taste buds, and it’s not bringing hot sauce.

    We are entering the era of algorithm-approved alimentation—a techno-utopia where food isn’t eaten, it’s administered. Where meals are no longer social rituals or sensory joys but compliance events optimized for satiety curves and glucose response. Your plate is now a spreadsheet, and your fork is a biometric reporting device.

    Already, AI nutrition platforms like Noom, Lumen, and MyFitnessPal’s AI-diet overlords are serving up daily menus based on your gut flora’s mood and whether your insulin levels are feeling emotionally regulated. These platforms don’t ask what you’re craving—they tell you what your metrics will tolerate. Dinner is no longer about joy; it’s about hitting your macros and earning a dopamine pellet for obedience.

    Tech elites have already evacuated the dinner table. For them, food is just software for the stomach. Soylent, Huel, Ka’chava—these aren’t meals, they’re edible flowcharts. Designed not for delight but for efficiency, these drinkable spreadsheets are powdered proof that the future of food is just enough taste to make you swallow.

    And let’s not forget Ozempic and its GLP-1 cousins—the hormonal muzzle for hunger. Pair that with AI wearables whispering sweet nothings like “Time for your lentil paste” and you’ve got a whole generation learning that wanting flavor is a failure of character. Forget foie gras. It’s psy-ops via quinoa gel.

    Even your grocery cart is under surveillance. AI shopping assistants—already lurking in apps like Instacart—will gently steer you away from handmade pasta and toward fermented fiber bars and shelf-stable cheese-like products. Got a hankering for camembert? Sorry, your AI gut-coach has flagged it as non-compliant dairy-based frivolity. Enjoy your pea-protein puck, peasant.

    Soon, your lunch break won’t be lunch or a break. It’ll be a Pomodoro-synced ingestion window in which you sip an AI-formulated mushroom slurry while doom-scrolling synthetic influencers on GLP-1. Your food won’t comfort you—it will stabilize you, and that’s the most terrifying part. Three times a day, you’ll sip the same beige sludge of cricket protein, nootropic fibers, and psychoactive stabilizers, each meal a contract with the status quo: You will feel nothing, and you will comply.

    And if you’re lucky enough to live in an AI-UBI future, don’t expect dinner to be celebratory. Expect it to be regulated, subsidized, and flavor-neutral. Your government food credits won’t cover artisan cheddar or small-batch bread. Instead, your AI grocery budget assistant will chirp:

    “This selection exceeds your optimal cost-to-nutrient ratio. May I suggest oat crisps and processed cheese spread at 50% less and 300% more compliance?”

    Even without work, you won’t have the freedom to indulge. Your wearable will monitor your blood sugar, cholesterol, and moral fiber. Have a rogue bite of truffle mac & cheese? That spike in glucose just docked you two points from your UBI wellness score:

    “Indulgent eating may affect eligibility for enhanced wellness bonuses. Consider lentil loaf next time, citizen.”

    Eventually, pleasure eating becomes a class marker, like opera tickets or handwritten letters. Rich eccentrics will dine on duck confit in secrecy while the rest of us drink our AI-approved nutrient slurry in 600-calorie increments at 13:05 sharp. Flavor becomes a crime of privilege.

    The final insult? Your children won’t even miss it. They’ll grow up thinking “food joy” is a myth—like cursive writing or butter. They’ll hear stories of crusty baguettes and sizzling fat the way Boomers talk about jazz clubs and cigarettes. Romantic, but reckless.

    In this optimized hellscape, eating is no longer an art. It’s a biometric negotiation between your body and a neural net that no longer trusts you to feed yourself responsibly.

    The future of food is functional. Beige. Pre-chewed by code. And flavor? That’s just a bug in the system.

  • How Headphones Made Me Emotionally Unavailable in High-Resolution Audio

    How Headphones Made Me Emotionally Unavailable in High-Resolution Audio

    After flying to Miami recently, I finally understood the full appeal of noise-canceling headphones—not just for travel, but for the everyday, ambient escape act they offer my college students. Several claim, straight-faced, that they “hear the lecture better” while playing ASMR in their headphones because it soothes their anxiety and makes them better listeners. Is this neurological wizardry? Or performance art? I’m not sure. But apocryphal or not, the explanation has stuck with me.

    It made me see the modern, high-grade headphone as something far more than a listening device. It’s a sanctuary, or to use the modern euphemism, an aural safe space in a chaotic world. You may not have millions to seal yourself in a hyperbaric oxygen pod inside a luxury doomsday bunker carved into the Montana granite during World War Z, but if you’ve got $500 and a credit score above sea level, you can disappear in style—into a pair of Sony MX6s or Audio-Technica ATH-R70s.

    The headphone, in this context, is not just gear—it’s armor. Whether cocobolo wood or carbon fiber, it communicates something quietly radical: “I have opted out.”

    You’re not rejecting the world with malice—you’re simply letting it know that you’ve found something better. Something more reliable. Something calibrated to your nervous system. In fact, you’ve severed communication so politely that all they hear is the faint thump of curated escapism pulsing through your earpads.

    For my students, these headphones are not fashion statements—they’re boundary-drawing devices. The outside world is a cacophony of canvas announcements, attention fatigue, and algorithmically optimized despair. Inside the headphones? Rain sounds. Lo-fi beats from a YouTube loop titled “study with me until the world ends.” Maybe even a softly muttering AI voice telling them they are enough.

    It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. It matters that it works.

    And here’s the deeper point: the headphone isn’t just a sanctuary. It’s a non-accountability device. You can’t be blamed for ghosting a group chat or zoning out during a team huddle when you’re visibly plugged into something more profound. You’re no longer rude—you’re occupied. Your silence is now technically sound.

    In a hyper-networked world that expects your every moment to be a node of productivity or empathy, the headphone is the last affordable luxury that buys you solitude without apology. You don’t need a manifesto. You just need active noise-canceling and a decent DAC.

    You’re not ignoring anyone. You’ve just entered your own monastery of midrange clarity, bass-forward detachment, and spatially engineered peace.

    And if someone wants your attention?

    Tell them to knock louder. You’re in sanctuary.

  • College Writing Prompt: The Willpower Illusion: Ozempic, Obesity, and the Myth of Self-Control in a the Aesthetic Industrial Complex

    College Writing Prompt: The Willpower Illusion: Ozempic, Obesity, and the Myth of Self-Control in a the Aesthetic Industrial Complex

    Overview:

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay exploring whether the dominant narrative about weight loss—discipline, clean eating, and personal responsibility—still holds up in the age of pharmaceutical intervention, economic inequality, and digital diet culture.

    Drawing from Rebecca Johns (“A Diet Writer’s Regrets”), Johann Hari (“A Year on Ozempic…”), Harriet Brown (“The Weight of the Evidence”), and Sandra Aamodt (“Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet”), analyze how obesity is shaped by factors far beyond individual willpower. Consider the influence of wealth disparity, pharmaceutical marketing, addictive food engineering, and digital culture on how we define health, blame failure, and reward certain bodies over others.

    Key Questions to Consider:

    • Is the belief in personal discipline as the primary tool for weight loss a dangerous oversimplification?
    • How do Ozempic and similar drugs challenge or reinforce our cultural obsession with self-control?
    • What role does economic privilege play in deciding who gets access to medical weight-loss interventions?
    • Are we witnessing a new form of techno-body capitalism where apps, injections, and dopamine loops manage our appetites better than we ever could?
    • How might social media, AI influencers, and fitness-tracking technologies contribute to a culture of body surveillance and shame?

    Required Sources (Use at least 4, MLA Format):

    • Rebecca Johns – “A Diet Writer’s Regrets”
    • Johann Hari – “A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong”
    • Harriet Brown – “The Weight of the Evidence”
    • Sandra Aamodt – “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet”

    Recommended Focus Areas:

    1. The Discipline Dilemma
     How Johns and Hari dismantle the myth that all it takes is willpower. What emotional, social, and physiological realities do they reveal?

    2. Set Points and Self-Sabotage
     How Aamodt and Brown explain the body’s resistance to permanent weight loss. What does the science say about the limits of effort?

    3. Ozempic and the Access Divide
     Ozempic works—but only for those who can afford it. How does this reflect a larger healthcare injustice?

    4. Capitalism’s Role in Body Control
     How the Industrial Food Complex profits from addiction, and Big Pharma profits from the “cure.” Is this a closed system of exploitation?

    5. Digital Diet Culture
     Optional but encouraged: bring in TikTok, fitness influencers, AI diet advice, or surveillance devices (like smartwatches and calorie-counting apps). How do these amplify shame or create new ideologies of control?

    Conclusion:

    Make a claim about how society should reframe the conversation around obesity and weight loss. Should we abandon the willpower narrative? Should access to medical treatments be universal? Should we question the legitimacy of “health” as a moral standard at all?

    Final Essay Requirements:

    • 1,700 words minimum
    • MLA format, 12pt Times New Roman, double-spaced
    • Include a clear thesis, transitions, and a conclusion
    • Use and cite at least 4 sources

    Submit with a Works Cited page

  • From Shawarma to Swing Sets: A Kettlebell Fitness Cultist Takes a Break

    From Shawarma to Swing Sets: A Kettlebell Fitness Cultist Takes a Break

    I took a rare sabbatical from my kettlebell gospel this Memorial Sunday to bask in the company of my cousin Pete and Aunt Sherry in Studio City—because even iron addicts need a cheat day, preferably one involving shawarma and nostalgia. We spent eight hours doing what old relatives do best: eating like we’re about to hibernate, name-dropping concerts that smelled like patchouli and regret, and arguing over which decade had the best moral compass (spoiler: none of them).

    Pete and I go way back—Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco clambakes, enough Passover seders to qualify for spiritual overtime. Our shared memories stretch across seven decades like a shag carpet in a time-warped rec room.

    The weather, because of course it was, clocked in at 75 degrees—sunny, breezy, and just obnoxiously pleasant. So much so, we weren’t content with one perfect meal. We closed the day with Korean barbecue that tasted like it had been grilled by angels on a smoke break. Then came the real miracle: we took the 405 back to Torrance and hit no traffic. That’s not just a good omen—it’s borderline apocalyptic.

    When we got home, I turned to my wife and said, “The day was too perfect. Should I call a priest or a statistician?”

    Once the existential dread of joy wore off, I returned to my senses and thought I’ll be 64 soon. I need to map out my plan to slam heavy iron for the rest of my natural life. A sacred vow, if you will:

    • Follow Mark Wildman’s mantra: “Train injury-free today so you can train tomorrow”—not “break yourself now to impress your ego.”
    • Heed Pavel’s wisdom: Push to 80–90% failure, not 100%, because no one gets a trophy for tearing their rotator cuff.
    • Devour 200 grams of protein a day like it’s my job—and in a way, it is.
    • Keep calories under 2,400 so I don’t end up looking like I survived Passover but lost to diabetes.
    • Be grateful for my garage gym—no excuses, no sweaty strangers, no corporate playlists.
    • Appreciate that my workout intensity still rivals that of my teenage self in the 1970s, minus the acne and naïve dreams of Olympic glory.
    • And above all, give thanks that my family doesn’t stage an intervention every time I start rhapsodizing about kettlebell geometry.

    In conclusion, it was a dangerously perfect day—full of grilled meats, shared myths, and suspiciously easy freeway exits. I’m not saying I’m suspicious of happiness, but I’m definitely side-eyeing it.

  • Hungerphoria: Finding Comfort in the Empty Stomach

    Hungerphoria: Finding Comfort in the Empty Stomach

    Let’s get something straight: my weight-loss quest isn’t about vanity. I’m not trying to become the next shirtless fitness guru hawking collagen peptides to the dopamine-addled masses on Instagram. No, this is about survival—mental and physical, which, despite popular delusion, are not separate departments. They’re a single, tangled mess of neurons and cravings, and if one goes down, the whole system buckles.

    So, I’ve been on a high-protein, calorie-restricted diet for five weeks (15 pounds lost so far). Not the sexy kind with green smoothies and acai bowls—this is grim, disciplined, macro-tracked warfare. And yet something strange and glorious is happening: my brain is beginning to like it.

    Case in point: I used to get jittery before class, pacing my office like a caged animal and convincing myself I needed a protein bar or an apple just to face a room of disinterested freshmen. But lately? I stroll in on an empty stomach like a monk walking into a Zen garden. The hunger is there, sure, but it doesn’t bark anymore. It purrs.

    Last night, same story. Three hours after dinner, the belly murmured—but instead of scrambling for almonds or scanning the fridge for peanut butter-oatmeal “protein” balls, I smiled. That emptiness didn’t feel like punishment. It felt like progress. A signal. A secret handshake from my metabolism saying, “We’re doing it. Keep going.”

    Which brings me to what I’m now calling Hungerphoria.

    Let’s define it properly, shall we?

    Hungerphoria is the paradoxical joy one feels in the disciplined embrace of hunger—a fleeting but addictive high that replaces food anxiety with a sense of mastery and serenity. Rather than viewing hunger as a threat or an emergency, the hungerphoric individual interprets the growl of an empty stomach as applause from the body’s metabolic engine. It’s not deprivation; it’s affirmation. Hungerphoria turns a late-night craving into a badge of progress, a quiet reminder that transformation is happening invisibly, molecule by molecule. Like the runner’s high or the monk’s calm, hungerphoria isn’t about denial—it’s about the subtle euphoria of restraint, the mental alchemy of converting appetite into purpose.

    Did I stumble onto this like a weary gold miner striking the motherlode? Maybe. Should I start selling merch—Hungerphoria hats, mugs, crop tops? Tempting. Should I become a lifestyle influencer preaching the gospel of the empty belly? Possibly.

    But then a voice in my head, the responsible one who still wears pants with belt loops, whispers: “Easy, tiger. Lose another thirty. Keep it off for a year. Then maybe you can start printing t-shirts.”

  • Flabnesia and the Fall of the Weight-Loss Hero

    Flabnesia and the Fall of the Weight-Loss Hero

    Congratulations! You’ve shed 47 pounds over 8 months, sliding from a swollen 247 to a sleek, even 200—the numerical promised land. At 247, you weren’t just overweight; you were a walking billboard for metabolic dysfunction. A bloated monument to poor impulse control. Your blood pressure was climbing Mount Everest, your triglycerides were hosting a rave, your fingers cracked like old parchment, and your foot buzzed with the low-voltage horror of neuropathy. Your joints? They screamed in Morse code every time you dared to walk more than half a Target.

    And let’s not forget the existential FOMO—not Fear of Missing Out on parties or vacations, but on the you you were supposed to be. The one who didn’t sound like an old staircase every time he stood up.

    But then, in a moment of uncharacteristic clarity—or maybe rage at your own reflection—you declared war on the fat demon. You slashed your calories to a monk-like 2,300, jacked your protein intake to bodybuilder levels, and banished refined carbs and sugar like they owed you money. Your entire cerebral cortex was repurposed into a fat-loss mission control center. Progress became your dopamine drip. Watching the numbers fall on the scale felt like watching your soul return from exile.

    You were, in the language of gymfluencers, “on a journey.” A phrase so overused it should be banished to a motivational poster graveyard. But cliché or not, the journey gave your life narrative structure. It made you feel heroic. Disciplined. Alive.

    And then—you arrived.

    Two hundred pounds. The exact number. Mission accomplished. Cue the existential silence.

    Because now what?

    With the drama over, meaning slips through your fingers like a protein shake on a sweaty treadmill. You no longer wake up with a fat war to fight. And into that vacuum slithers the ancient enemy of every former fatty: complacency.

    Complacency brings friends. First comes Calorie Creep—just a nibble here, a mindless bite there, a slow but deliberate loosening of your former austerity. Then arrives Flabnesia, that insidious amnesia that erases the memory of how awful 247 felt—how humiliating, how painful, how limited. Your jeans start getting tight again, and you blink in confusion as if the dryer is gaslighting you.

    Next, the cruelest symptom of all: Goalstalgia—a perverse longing for the righteous high of the weight-loss struggle. You miss the purpose, the metrics, the drama. And in a dark twist of psychological masochism, you begin to sabotage yourself, just to start over—to claw your way out of the hole you’re actively digging again.

    And so the cycle begins anew. You are no longer the master of your fate or the captain of your macros. You are a cautionary tale—an Ouroboros in athleisure, endlessly consuming your own progress.

  • Sociopathware: When “Social” Media Turns on You

    Sociopathware: When “Social” Media Turns on You

    Reading Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine is like realizing that Black Mirror isn’t speculative fiction—it’s journalism. Seymour depicts our digital lives not as a harmless distraction, but as a propaganda-laced fever swamp where we are less users than livestock—bred for data, addicted to outrage, and stripped of self-agency. Watching sociopathic tech billionaires rise to power makes a dark kind of sense once you grasp that mass digital degradation isn’t a glitch—it’s the business model. We’re not approaching dystopia. We’re soaking in it.

    Most of us are already trapped in Seymour’s machine, flapping like digital pigeons in a Skinner Box—pecking for likes, retweets, or one more fleeting dopamine pellet. We scroll ourselves into oblivion, zombified by clickbait and influencer melodrama. Yet, a flicker of awareness sometimes breaks through the haze. We feel it in our fogged-over thoughts, our shortened attention spans, and our anxious obsession with being “seen” by strangers. We suspect that something inside us is being hollowed out.

    But Seymour doesn’t offer false comfort. He cites a 2015 study in which people attempted to quit Facebook for 99 days. Most couldn’t make it past 72 hours. Many defected to Instagram or Twitter instead—same addiction, different flavor. Only a rare few fully unplugged, and they reported something radical: clarity, calm, and a sudden liberation from the exhausting treadmill of self-performance. They had severed the feed and stepped outside what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls gamification capitalism—a regime where every social interaction is a data point, and every self is an audition tape.

    Seymour’s conclusion is damning: it’s time to retire the quaint euphemism “social media.” The phrase slipped into our cultural vocabulary like a charming grifter—suggesting friendly exchanges over digital lattes. But this is no buzzing café. It’s a dopamine-spewing Digital Skinner Box, where we tap and swipe like lab rats begging for validation. What we’re calling “social” is in fact algorithmic manipulation wrapped in UX design. We are not exchanging ideas—we are selling our attention for hollow engagement while surrendering our behavior to surveillance capitalists who harvest us like ethical-free farmers with no livestock regulations.

    Richard Seymour calls this system The Twittering Machine. Byung-Chul Han calls it gamification capitalism. Anna Lembke, in Dopamine Nation, calls it overstimulation as societal collapse. And thinkers studying Algorithmic Capture say we’ve reached the point where we no longer shape technology—technology shapes us. Let’s be honest: this isn’t “social media.” It’s Sociopathware. It’s addiction media. It’s the slow, glossy erosion of the self, optimized for engagement, monetized by mental disintegration.

    Here’s the part you won’t hear in a TED Talk or an onboarding video: Sociopathware was never designed to serve you. It was built to study you—your moods, fears, cravings, and insecurities—and then weaponize that knowledge to keep you scrolling, swiping, and endlessly performing. Every “like” you chase, every selfie you tweak, every argument you think you’re winning online—those are breadcrumbs in a maze you didn’t design. The longer you’re inside it, the more your sense of self becomes an avatar—algorithmically curated, strategically muted, optimized for appeal. That’s not agency. That’s submission in costume. And the more you rely on these platforms for validation, identity, or even basic social interaction, the more control you hand over to a machine that profits when you forget who you really are. If you value your voice, your mind, and your ability to think freely, don’t let a dashboard dictate your personality.