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

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.

Because once you are chosen, you exist. You are real enough to register in someone else’s hierarchy. To be chosen is to temporarily stop doubting that you matter. To be loved, however, demands that you risk existing without performance, and that’s much harder.

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

Choice, untethered from devotion, breeds its own emptiness.

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.

You no longer have to sell your labour; you can now sell your personality, your sadness, your taste in books, your curated spontaneity. The market doesn’t ask you to betray yourself. It simply asks you to perform authenticity on schedule.

Love cannot be negotiated in the language of scarcity. But by the time I understood that, I was already fluent in the dialect of deficit, the one where you apologise for being “too much”, lower your expectations, smile at crumbs, and call it compromise. It’s the language women learn when love is rationed, when approval is currency, when affection... 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.