The Feed Is a Ritual of Obedience
There comes a point where you have to stop pretending you are merely “stressed,” “busy,” or “behind,” and admit something much uglier. Many of us have been trained into reaction. Trained into noise. Trained into speaking before understanding, scrolling before breathing, defending before defining, consuming before discerning. We are spiritually starved and overstimulated, then told this is normal life.
It is not normal life.
It is conditioning.
The feed is not just entertainment. It is a ritual. A daily rite of surrender. It teaches the hand to reach, the eye to flick, the mind to fracture, the tongue to react, and the soul to remain unfed. It rewards speed over understanding and visibility over wisdom. It makes people feel informed while steadily breaking their relationship to silence, memory, and truth.
And before anyone gets smug, nobody is exempt. Not the rich. Not the poor. Not the “awake.” Not the “skeptical.” Not the “natural.” Not the ones who think they are above influence because they repost the right things. We were all born downstream of the same severing. We were raised in a civilization that monetizes distraction, poisons appetite, and calls dependence freedom.
The record already says more than enough.
The Federal Trade Commission defines commercial surveillance as the business of collecting, analyzing, and profiting from information about people. In 2025, the FTC said its surveillance pricing study found that details such as a person’s precise location or browser history can be used to target different people with different prices for the same goods and services. In plain language, you are not just being shown things. You are being measured, sorted, and treated accordingly.
That alone should stop people in their tracks, but most will keep scrolling.
The Surgeon General has also said we cannot conclude social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents. The same advisory says social media use among young people is nearly universal, that up to 95% of those aged 13 to 17 report using a platform, and that spending more than three hours a day on social media is associated with double the risk of mental health problems including symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Think about how insane that is.
We have built a society where the public health warning exists, the regulatory warning exists, the psychological damage is discussed openly, the data extraction is not even hidden well anymore, and still people line up to defend the very systems hollowing them out. We defend the feed because the feed has become one of the places we go to avoid meeting ourselves. We defend our favorite poisons because without them we might have to sit in a room with our own thoughts and discover how malnourished we have become in spirit.
That is the real crisis.
Not just that people are online too much. Not just that kids are anxious. Not just that prices shift in the shadows. The deeper wound is that people have been trained out of inwardness. Out of right speech. Out of reverence. Out of the ancestral human instinct to stop, observe, define, and choose carefully.
People no longer even look up the meaning of the words they are swinging around. They hear a phrase, catch a charge, feel a sting to the ego, and react on cue. This is not sovereignty. This is puppetry with good branding.
And yes, I am included in that indictment.
I do not write from some untouched mountaintop. I write as someone still living inside the machine, still fighting its hooks, still trying to peel its voice off my own nervous system. That is what makes this so grievous. We are not talking about some distant evil. We are talking about a daily liturgy that many of us perform with our own hands before our feet touch the floor in the morning.
Wake. Reach. Glow. Input. React.
That is a ritual.
But it is not ours.
Our ancestors were not flawless, but many of them still understood something we have nearly lost: a human being is shaped by what they repeatedly attend to. By the light they live under. By the words they use. By the sounds that enter the body. By the food they eat. By the people they keep. By the gods they face. By the truths they are willing to pay for.
Odin did not become wise by chasing comfort, consensus, or constant stimulation. In the old stories, wisdom costs. Sight costs. Discipline costs. Right knowing is not handed to the lazy, the distracted, or the endlessly entertained. If you want truth, you give something up for it. Usually something you were clinging to.
That is the opposite of feed culture.
The feed asks nothing noble of you. It does not ask for courage. It does not ask for stillness. It does not ask for discernment. It asks only for your time, your attention, your reactions, your purchasing habits, your insecurity, your loneliness, your envy, and eventually your language. It will take them all gladly.
And while people obsess over appearances, trends, and the usual American garbage pile of success theater, the older human capacities continue to rot: direct observation, silence, restraint, prayer, memory, handwork, patience, embodied presence, local belonging, true kinship, and honest speech. We have been taught to call this progress.
I do not.
I think much of what passes for modern life is managed fragmentation. I think many people are terrified of being unentertained because they have been taught to fear what rises in the quiet. I think many of us hold closest the very things that make us feel most inhuman, then wonder why the world feels hostile and unreal.
And it did not all happen by accident.
In the early 20th century, the General Education Board and Rockefeller Foundation helped transform medical education into a more centralized, university- and laboratory-based model, tying funded schools to hospitals and full-time faculty structures. Historical work also argues those funding choices helped marginalize homeopathy and other competing healing traditions as “scientific medicine” consolidated institutional power. That does not mean every modern medical advance is false. It means the old ways were not simply forgotten in some innocent drift. Many were pushed outward, starved of legitimacy, or buried beneath the prestige of industrial systems.
So no, nobody is exempt from the persecution of lie and the hiding of ancestral ways. We are all living in the aftermath of greed, scale, and institutional appetite. We are the outcome of money, even when we do not have any. The poor eat the same poisoned food, breathe the same fouled air, stare into the same dead light, and inherit the same broken language. That is how a lie becomes a civilization.
Still, despair is lazy if it does not lead anywhere.
The point is not to panic. The point is not to impress anyone with how much hidden history you can recite. The point is not to become a professional doom-talker. The point is to stop cooperating so blindly. To become harder to script. To become less delicious to the machine.
That begins very small.
It begins when you stop handing your first waking thoughts to a device.
It begins when you stop reacting to words you have not defined.
It begins when you stop mistaking constant input for insight.
It begins when you remember that attention is sacred, and where you place it shapes what you become.
A small rite for breaking spell-contact
Do this for seven days.
When you wake, do not touch your phone for the first hour.
Not thirty seconds. Not to “just check one thing.” Not to look at the weather, your messages, the market, the headlines, your likes, or anyone else’s performance. Leave it. Let your mind arrive before the world touches it.
Wash your face in cold water. Open a window or step outside. Let real air strike your skin before artificial light strikes your eyes.
Light a candle if you have one. Sit down with paper, not a screen.
Draw or write Ansuz, the rune of breath, speech, signal, and inspired knowing. Then speak this aloud:
I refuse false urgency.
I refuse borrowed thought.
I refuse the ritual of obedience.
Let my speech be clean.
Let my sight be costly.
Let me meet the day as a human being, not a feed animal.
Then write three things:
What has been getting first claim on my attention?
What words have I been using without understanding?
What do I already know is poisoning me, but keep defending anyway?
Do not write for performance. Write to catch yourself in the act.
At sundown, cut the scroll-strobe loop. No endless feed after dark. No lying in bed under dead blue light while calling it rest. Read something older than your apps. Mend something. Sweep. Pray. Sit in the quiet long enough to feel how agitated you have become.
That agitation is not proof that you need the feed.
It is proof that the feed has been feeding on you.
Final word
I do not need everyone to agree with this. I do not need everyone to act on it. I do not need applause, a perfect outcome, or a polished audience. I want a record that says someone still bothered to name the trap while there was still time.
Inform, not conform.
If this reaches the right person, good.
If it irritates the defensive, fine.
If it helps even one person look in the mirror and realize they have been giving their breath, speech, sight, and mornings to a machine that does not love them, then it has done enough.
Stop calling captivity connection.
Stop calling dependence convenience.
Stop calling fragmentation life.
Look up.
Define your words.
Guard your mornings.
Take back your mind.
That is where the work begins.
