Refined or confined?

My LinkedIn feed has become an ultra personalised sameness-fest.

I remember sitting in an exec meeting years ago talking about how data was going to enable us to get super personal with customers, that through this we would know them better than they know themselves. I thought ‘cool, no more marketing emails about cat stuff when I’m a dog person.’ What a timesaver, what I need will be delivered right to me.

But now I’m in it, in this uber refined, clinically curated feed, I’m sad.

Sad that it feels like I’m surrounded by things that validate a narrow way of thinking, rather than expand my perspectives. Frustrated that I might be missing out on reading or seeing things that make me challenge my view. Knowing that in so many conversations and online ‘insight’, I’m not interacting with the messy and unfiltered real version of the person who wrote it, but rather the sanitised and perfected no typo, crafted by their delegated thought partner Mr GpT.

Disappointed in the need to plug in consistently, otherwise posts I think will help people get no reach, the algorithms rating me as not valid enough. No space for inconsistency.

What was meant to refine us is now confining us.

We are the product. The sites want us to be constantly engaged, they need us to be always creating content otherwise they become irrelevant. People say that they want growth, but the systems are now pushing us to engage with content that confirms us.

My granny had a phrase ‘what’s for you won’t go by you’. But in this data refined way we now experience daily life, who is really deciding what is for us? Because in this ask to get more personal, it’s become a mirror, not a window. What are we not seeing?

And then I remember, we always have choice.

It’s one of the most delicious parts of our humanness.

In every moment, we can pick up a book of something we have no idea about, enter a world we’ve never been in. Walk an aisle in the supermarket and pick up something that we haven’t seen an advert for. We can pick up the phone and speak to someone who we can bounce off with. We can go walk and shake it all off. Hug a dog (or cat).

We can bring the messiness, nonsense and unfiltered joy.

Every minute we get to be here, we get to choose what happens, where we put our attention.

In systems that are increasingly personalised for us, we have to become uber intentional about who we are becoming. Curate our inputs, not just consume them.

So interrupt it. Not passively, but deliberately.

Choose things that don’t immediately resonate.

Follow voices that challenge you, not just validate you.

Sit with your own thinking before reaching for someone or something else’s. Challenge yourself.

Share something silly. Like the joy of hanging laundry in blue skies today!

Because if we don’t take control of what shapes our perspective, something else will.

And it won’t be designed to stretch us, only to keep us engaged.

So spark a thought, debate, share.

With another human.

Is it just me?