Screens no longer blink with novelty; they pulse with something subtler. A soft blue glow wakes the day before sunlight, and sleep fades under the quiet buzz of reminders. Each gesture, tapping, swiping, scrolling, disguises an internal drift, like footprints forming across sand, barely noticed until the tide shifts. The world still stands outside the window, but its tempo feels muffled, as if real life waits for permission from behind a pane of glass.
Conversations, once unpredictable, now arrive in dotted bubbles, typed pauses holding more tension than silence ever did. Laughter echoes through speakers, sincere, perhaps, but strangely flattened. Even solitude is redesigned, no longer a quiet space, but a feed, a stream, a curated reflection that rarely reflects. Thoughts that once wandered are now nudged and framed, shaped by patterns unseen, trained by repetition rather than contemplation.
Meanwhile, the machine's hum is barely noticed. Its silent logic organizes routes, filters memories, fills pauses, suggests feelings, and predicts needs. It doesn't demand attention; it absorbs it. And the user, without command or instruction, responds in kind, merging unknowingly into its rhythm. Amid all this motion, something fundamental stills.
A certain clarity dims, not by force, but by slow, frictionless surrender. Familiar instincts grow quiet, replaced by instant response and layered projection. And beneath the ease, a question breathes: if the self is constantly accompanied, sculpted, and echoed by digital presences, what space remains for solitude that is unlit, unshared, undefined?
