The Factory Settings of the Human Race

Instagram didn’t invent the collapse.
It just sharpened the image.

The world was already teaching us to flatten ourselves —
to become versions of versions, reflections of reflections,
copies traced from someone else's shaky hands.

You scroll, and it feels like drowning in beige.

The same smiles, the same captions, the same curated performances of happiness.
The same dead light behind the eyes.

And the worst part isn’t that it’s fake.
It’s that it’s real —
it’s exactly what most people want now.

Safety that looks like life.

"They don’t want to be remembered.
They want to be tolerated."

You think if you log off it’ll be different.
Step outside —
you’ll see the same glazed compliance wearing nicer shoes.

Fear dressed as ambition.
Loneliness dressed as networking.
Self-erasure dressed as self-care.

Everyone learning to be saleable long before they ever learned to be human.

There’s no victory in being the most popular ghost.

There’s no prize for blending in so well they forget you were ever there at all.

There’s just the choice —
every day —
to risk looking strange, sounding wrong, loving too hard, hurting too publicly.

There’s just the tiny rebellion of still writing your own goddamn name down,
even when the world would prefer you came pre-labeled.