Serendipity is so much better than the algorithm

Mushrooms growing out of a fallen redwood tree on my street.

The algorithm is everywhere. So many of us are comfortably, unknowingly imprisoned in it.

Our thinking. Our language. Our way of relating to ourselves and each other. All of it is formed around whatever the machine is feeding us, looping back the fears and biases we’ve already fed into it.

I look around at my friends and the people I follow online, and the pattern is obvious. We talk the same way. Call out the same people. Are terrified of the same headlines. Binge the same shows and read the same Substacks.

It is boring.
Algorithmic life
is boring.

It isn’t real life. It’s a life based on a technological mimicry of a human brain. And in turn, it re-programs us to mimic the machine. We’re becoming a copy of a copy.

What’s great about the real world is that it’s not based on the algorithm… It’s based on Serendipity.

This is why walking into a dusty, dimly lit bookstore is so much more interesting than what my Amazon “Recommended for You” tab suggests.

In the bookstore, I can happen upon something
that’s so far outside my usual habits
that it actually pulls me
into a different way of seeing the world.

And that’s just delightful.

It’s an expansive way of being
that brings me out of the loop
and into serendipitous, ever-expansive fullness
following the next nudge
and the next
and the next
pulled forward by whimsical delight
rather than pushed along by siloed prediction.

The algorithm knows what I’ve already chosen.
Serendipity knows what I didn’t know I needed.