Just Trust the Process
At some point, we collectively decided that anything even mildly inconvenient was unacceptable. Waiting? Absolutely barbaric. Typing things manually? Totally offensive. Making a decision without a glowing “recommended for you” button guiding your fragile psyche? NOPE. So we fixed it. We streamlined everything into a silky, uninterrupted experience where every action flows seamlessly into the next like a motivational speaker’s worst nightmare. One click. Auto-fill. Auto-play. Auto fucking everything. And it worked, so beautifully. Things are faster. Smoother. Easier. You can accomplish more in five minutes than someone in 1998 could in a day. Stunning achievement. Minor side effect: we accidentally deleted the part where you actually think.
Convenience not only removed effort. It also removed the moment you would have questioned what you’re doing.
Friction, as it turns out, was never just an obstacle. It was doing unglamorous, and cognitive labor. It forced you to hesitate for half a second, to compare, to reconsider, to experience that faint, irritating whisper of “is this actually a good idea?” That whisper is called judgment. Not a personality trait, not a moral virtue, but a process, one that requires interruption. Remove the interruption, and the process doesn’t accelerate. It vanishes. What replaces it is momentum. You see something, you move forward. You don’t deliberate, you continue. After some time, continuation feels indistinguishable from choice.
This is a decline in the conditions required to use intelligence.
You now feel decisive while mostly participating in a beautifully engineered conveyor belt of behavior.
Most of what you call “your choices” are honestly just things you didn’t interrupt.
