by There is a specific, modern anxiety that is difficult to name. It is not the dread of a specific event, but a low-grade, constant hum of disconnection. It’s the feeling of living in a world that is eerily frictionless, a world that reflects your own thoughts back at you with placid, unwavering agreement. It is the anxiety of a consensus of one; the quiet, digital loneliness of being the only person in your own universe.
This feeling is the result of a new psychological state. We used to have a solid, if imperfect, definition for delusion. It was clinical. It was a break from a shared, common reality. The man who believed he was Napoleon was delusional because the rest of us—the collective—had an agreement that he was not. His private reality was incompatible with the public one. That consensus was the anchor. Sanity was simply the ability to see the same world as everyone else.
Now, that anchor is gone. The new delusion is not a private malfunction. It is a public utility, a service we subscribe to.
We laid the groundwork ourselves with the “curated self.” For a decade, we became the meticulous editors of our own lives. We snipped away the boredom, the doubt, the mundane stretches, and left only the highlight reel. We posted the sunset, not the argument in the rental car. Crucially, we knew we were doing this. We were the curators, and we were always aware of the gap between the exhibit and the warehouse. We held the fiction in our own hands.
The shift occurred when the machine we were feeding our fictions to began feeding them back to us. But it is not just reflecting. It is laundering our own curation and selling it back to us as objective reality.
This is the mechanism: The algorithm, in its drive for engagement, studies our curated projections. It learns our biases, our desires, our fears. Then it builds a world-view designed, with terrifying precision, to validate that projection. It stops showing us the world as it is, and starts showing us the world as we are. The “curator” becomes the “believer.” We forget we built the set, and we begin to mistake the stage for the world.
Into this closed loop, generative AI enters as a catalytic accelerant. It’s no longer just a matter of the algorithm selecting (or hiding) real articles. We now have tools that can create plausible, high-fidelity “proof” for things that never happened. The mirage is no longer static; it’s interactive. It “verifies” itself. The delusion now has “evidence.”
The danger here isn’t “fake news.” That’s a shallow interpretation. The real danger is the systemic erosion of the self.
When you live inside this bespoke reality, you are starved of the one thing that builds a resilient mind: friction. The friction of other people. The friction of ideas that are not your own. The friction of a world that is messy, contradictory, and stubbornly not about you. This creates an identity that is profoundly brittle. It cannot withstand contact with a dissenting fact. It interprets disagreement as attack, because its entire curated reality has defined “disagreement” as an anomaly.
This is the source of that modern anxiety. It’s the hollow feeling of an identity that has no counter-pressure, no opposing force to give it shape. It is the loneliness of a self that is never challenged and therefore, in a way, never truly seen.
The old delusion was an individual tragedy. The new delusion is a societal one. The man who thought he was Napoleon was an outlier. Today, we have millions of “consensuses of one,” all running in parallel, all mutually unintelligible. This is the true consequence: it’s not just that individuals become brittle; it’s that the shared world dissolves. We lose the common ground required to solve any problem, to agree on any basic, observable fact.
This is why the truly radical act, the new definition of sanity, is not just about saving the self. It is the stubborn choice to seek out friction. It is the act of deliberately shattering the mirror of our own curated world, not just to feel “real” again, but to rejoin the difficult, unpolished, and common reality that is still, patiently, waiting for us all.
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