Still, there’s a dangerous comfort in being chosen. It feels easier. It spares you the loneliness of self-definition. Someone else does the selecting, and you just step into the role. That’s why so many people stay in half-alive relationships or misaligned jobs.... inertia, not ignorance. Being chosen relieves you of the burden of choosing. It... See more

To choose yourself is not to renounce others, but to renounce dependency on their recognition. You defy the transactional logic that governs everything from dating to politics. It’s refusing to let rejection define your narrative. It’s knowing that sometimes the room you weren’t invited into would have cost you your voice.

Breaking the addiction to being chosen is brutal. The withdrawal symptoms include existential doubt, social invisibility, and long stretches of unglamorous solitude. You begin to see how much of your identity was outsourced to other people’s approval. You notice how silence feels unbearable because it doesn’t echo back your worth. And then, slowly,... See more

The difference between being chosen and being loved is subtle but seismic. Being chosen flatters the ego. Being loved nourishes the soul. The former depends on conditions; the latter survives despite them. To be chosen is to be desired for what you display. To be loved is to be accepted for what you reveal when the display collapses.

Feminism told us to choose ourselves, but capitalism quickly monetised that too. “Self-love” became another product category. You can now buy your autonomy in skincare form. It’s genius, really, turning emancipation into retail therapy. The rhetoric of empowerment was rebranded into the same old consumer loop: You are enough... once you purchase... See more

Originality lives in the spaces abandoned by approval. To be unchosen is to be unobserved, and therefore unrepeatable. You stop contorting to fit into someone else’s criteria of desirability and start listening for subtler signals: the sound of your own life resuming its pulse, the small tug of instinct that doesn’t need validation to make sense.

And so, even in our supposed enlightenment, we remain religious beings: anxious, hopeful, and perpetually dependent on the unpredictable mercy of an invisible system. The new gods are algorithms, but their essence hasn’t changed. They promise immortality through virality, legacy, digital trace. They warn of hell: irrelevance, cancellation, silence.... See more

In a strange way, the algorithm is the perfect deity for late capitalism: capricious, opaque, and transactional. It rewards devotion with exposure, but never permanence. Its miracles are fleeting, its commandments contradictory. It preaches meritocracy but runs on manipulation.

Choice, untethered from devotion, breeds its own emptiness.