I’m watching my nephew scroll through TikTok at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Bali. We’re surrounded by hand-carved sculptures, the sound of gamelan drifting from the kitchen, air thick with frangipani. His parents spent three months saving for this meal.

He hasn’t looked up once.

“The wifi is slow,” he complains, thumb flicking upward in that unconscious rhythm I now recognise everywhere.

Swipe. Consume. Swipe. Consume.

His attention, the same attention that should be drinking in this moment that his parents will remember for years, is trapped in a three-inch screen, waiting for an algorithm to decide what deserves his next three seconds.

And sure, you could describe this as simply "teenage rudeness". But we all know that this is symbolic of a much larger dynamic in the world; the death of human choice itself.

Three months after that dinner, I tried something that should have been simple: I asked myself to choose what to watch on YouTube without looking at the homepage suggestions.

I stared at a blank search bar for four minutes, paralysed.

The last time I’d made an autonomous decision about what to consume, I couldn’t remember. Every video, every article, every song that had shaped my thoughts in recent months - all of it had been suggested to me by systems designed to predict what I wanted before I knew I wanted it.

When did choosing what to watch become such a hard task?

And it made realise that my nephew didn’t choose to ignore the carved statues or the traditional music at that restaurant. He simply couldn’t choose to notice them. His attention had been so systematically redirected that the capacity for conscious choice had atrophied.

We think of attention as something we direct. But attention is something we become.

Where your attention goes consistently, your consciousness follows. The child who can’t lift his eyes from a screen in paradise is becoming someone incapable of recognising paradise when he finds it.

The Digital Origins

Last year, I tried an experiment that changed everything.

I listed my ten strongest opinions about music, politics, and relationships. Then I traced each one backward through my digital history - the YouTube video that introduced me to that band, the Twitter thread that crystallised that political view, the Instagram post that shaped how I think about love.

Eight of ten traced directly to algorithmic suggestions.

I wasn’t discovering my authentic self through digital exploration, as I thought I was.

Instead, I was being assembled by an algorithm that knew me better than I knew myself. The recommendations felt like insights into my deepest nature, but they were actually predictions about my future behaviour based on past data.

I thought I was becoming myself. But I was becoming the person an algorithm calculated I should be.

And man, did it work wonders.

I genuinely loved those bands, believed those ideas, felt those feelings. The manipulation was so sophisticated that the manipulated preferences became authentically mine.

This is how we became passengers: not through force, but through the systematic elimination of the need to choose.

YouTube still requires you to click on a video. TikTok has already chosen for you, just open the app and consume. Each eliminated choice represents a small surrender of autonomy, and these surrenders compound like interest.

At the end of the day, the algorithm’s goal isn’t wisdom or well-being. It’s engagement and profit.

And so our instincts gradually evolve to gravitate toward comfort and stimulation rather than fulfilment and satisfaction. We become bodies optimised for consumption rather than creation, with minimal need for the contemplation or original thinking that once defined human consciousness.

The Day I Went Analog

There was one day where I tried living without algorithmic input. No restaurant apps, no Netflix suggestions, no YouTube homepage. By evening, I was paralysed.

Making basic choices - what to eat, what to watch - felt like lifting weights with muscles I’d forgotten I had.

But something remarkable happened.

Instead of ordering takeout through an app, I wandered into a used bookstore. Found a book about mycorrhizal networks that changed how I think about connection. Had a conversation with the owner about his ten-year search for a particular out-of-print poetry collection. Discovered that uncertainty, rather than being an obstacle to overcome, was the doorway to experiences no algorithm could have predicted.

I realised I’d forgotten what surprise felt like. Real surprise, not the pseudo-surprise of algorithmic novelty, but the deep surprise of encountering something genuinely unexpected, something that expanded rather than confirmed who I thought I was.

That night, I made a decision that came from somewhere deeper than my recent browsing history. I decided to learn guitar. Not because it was trending, not because someone suggested it, but because walking past a music shop that afternoon, I’d heard someone playing and felt something stir that had nothing to do with optimisation or efficiency.

The Seeds We Don’t Notice

I've learnt a thing or two from tracing my beliefs back to their digital origins. The most being that algorithms don’t just predict what you want, but they plant seeds in your consciousness without your awareness. They feed you information in a carefully biased manner, establishing opinions for you before you even realise you’re forming them.

Before we get to explore what we truly desire, we’re already presented with what the algorithm thinks we desire, based on our digital exhaust.

Everything feels like inspiration, but there’s no way to measure originality anymore. A groundbreaking idea that feels revolutionary to you could be the predictable output of algorithmic recombination.

We’re approaching a world where identity is no longer accumulated through personal experiences and reflections unique to you. Identity is created through the media we consume, the archetype or aesthetic we try to fit ourselves into. And everybody has access to these same algorithmic inputs.

The more the world is made for us, the less we feel at home in it.

What My Seven-Year-Old Niece Taught Me

My nephew never did look up from his phone that night in Bali. But his younger sister, seven years old, no device, spent an hour collecting shells in the moonlight, arranging them in patterns only she understood. She was choosing her attention moment by moment, building memories that belonged entirely to her.

Watching her, I saw what we’d lost: the capacity to be genuinely surprised by our own curiosity. To follow interest without knowing where it leads. To choose not because something was suggested, but because something called to us from beyond the predictable.

She showed me that reclaiming choice is about remembering what autonomous attention feels like.

The Practice of Choosing

Here’s how I started rebuilding my capacity for choice:

The Identity Archaeology: I regularly trace my preferences back to their sources. Which beliefs can I connect to specific digital influences? What ideas feel like “mine” but originated from content I consumed? Who would I be if I’d never encountered my favourite digital creators?

The Uncertainty Practice: I deliberately seek situations without algorithmic guidance. I plan weekends without consulting apps. I choose creative projects based on internal inspiration, not trending topics. I make decisions through personal reflection rather than digital research.

None of this is for the sake of eliminating helpful technology. Instead, It’s to maintain the capacity for autonomous choice and to stay conscious enough to decide when and how I engage with algorithmic assistance.

The Path Back to Paradise

Six months after that dinner in Bali, I visited my nephew again. This time, I tried something different. Instead of lamenting his screen time, I asked him to teach me about the creators he followed. We watched videos together, and I asked him what he genuinely liked versus what just appeared in his feed.

After that, he started noticing the difference between choosing and consuming. He began pausing before opening TikTok to ask himself what he actually wanted to discover.

The paradise those children couldn’t enjoy still exists. But accessing it requires reclaiming the most fundamentally human capacity of all: the ability to choose what deserves your attention, and by extension, what deserves your life.

Every autonomous decision you make today is an act of existential rebellion.

Every moment of unguided attention is a victory for human consciousness over algorithmic simulation.