YOU ARE WHAT YOU SCROLL (2025)

W.B. Yeats said once that “the world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” And yet, instead of sharpening our senses, we dull them, scroll by scroll, click by click. Every time we unlock our phones, stepping into the infinite sprawl of social media, we wade through a deluge of digital debris. It is not wisdom that greets us, nor beauty, nor truth. It is spectacle. It is noise. It is the algorithm’s relentless churn, feeding our insecurities, our envy, our self-pity, until we are left not enriched, but diminished. We are not merely drowning the planet in waste, we are drowning ourselves. Our minds, once fertile ground for curiosity and depth, are now landfills of fleeting trends, performative outrage, and hollow validation. We consume and are consumed. As Nietzsche warned, “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” This piece is a reflection of that abyss, a mirror to the quiet violence of digital excess. It asks: what are we doing to our minds? And more importantly, what could we be, if we chose differently?