Jenna Guarascio

We are all so online, yet being online feels so solitary. I can’t feel the people across the feeds from me. Social media is designed for consumption of content, distribution of branding, broadcasting of prestige, not spontaneous encounters or the warm, funny, and weird moments that happen when humans simply exist together.

The Internet is still a place, but it’s been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the... See more

There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.”

Every time you choose the summary over the story, you're performing surgery on your own brain. You're cutting away the neural pathways that let you sit still, that let you stay curious, that let mystery work its slow magic on your bones. You become a creature of surfaces, skimming endlessly across the water but never learning to breathe underwater.... See more

We've built temples to the lie that you can skip the line on your own life, that growth is just another thing you can Amazon Prime to your doorstep.

We want the wisdom without the patient work of becoming wise.

This compression culture doesn't just change how we think, but I argue it changes what we expect from every aspect of human experience! We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can always be whittled down, that difficulty can always be optimized away, that transformation should be instant and effortless.

We've created a culture that treats depth like inefficiency. One that wants love without awkwardness, wisdom without confusion, transformation without the growing pains that crack us open and rebuild us from the inside out. And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not... See more