Blood Moon
They say Minneapolis is the next big city everyone's moving to. I don't know who "they" are. They is an Instagram reel with 40,000 likes and a comment section full of people who have never been to Minneapolis. They is an article that was probably written by AI, aggregated from other articles that were definitely written by AI, based on a Reddit thread started by a bot. Doesn't matter. I'm already looking at apartments.
Have you seen the trend where everyone's buying food off Facebook Marketplace? Strangers selling seafood boils out of their kitchens like it's a used couch. A woman a few streets down is moving units of flan. This is either the collapse of the regulatory state or the most beautiful thing humans have ever done with a platform designed to sell your data. Probably both. It's always both.
It's hazy again from the wildfires. The sun looks muted, that hint of smoke hanging in the air. I keep thinking I should start wearing a mask outside, like the guys in the apocalypse movies, but it's real life and nobody's sprinting through rubble. We're all checking the AQI app and going to Trader Joe's anyway.
I learned about Minneapolis, the flan lady, and the wildfires in the same ninety seconds of scrolling. I felt about the same about all three.
One of the most comforting things about being human has always been finding out you're not the first person to feel something. Someone has already fallen in love like you have, already grieved like you have, already wondered if they're wasting their life. That's one of art's oldest jobs: making us feel less alone. Grief is a destination you can arrive at from a million different directions. And that destination was enough. We didn't need to take the same road to get there. But now we're sharing the route too. We watch the same videos, buy the same products, eat at the same restaurants, use the same words, move to the same cities because someone made a convincing reel about them. But if that's just what being human looks like now, and I enjoy all of this as much as the next person, what's the problem?
What happens to creativity in an increasingly homogenous world? New stuff comes from people who've seen different stuff, and nobody's seeing different stuff anymore. Every YouTube thumbnail converges to the same shocked face next to the same red arrow because that's what works. Every article sounds like it was trained on another article. Every restaurant is beige and sells a $19 grain bowl. I ate at one today. Every meme is the same meme wearing a different hat. I don't like memes. I don't like Jimothy. I'm sorry.
And I know the answer. The answer is obvious. I need to delete my social media.
But let's be honest, I also want to post on social media and go viral.
Both of these are true and I've been holding them the way the sky holds smoke and sunlight at the same time these days. It's bad and it's beautiful, but that's being alive in 2026. I want to log off forever and I want everyone to watch me do it. I want to escape the algorithm and I want the algorithm to notice I left.
Yesterday I drove to Yellowstone with no itinerary or expectations. No Instagram reel told me the five places I had to see, no YouTube short promised three hidden spots no one knows about. The steam came off the ground like the planet was breathing and there wasn't a single red arrow pointing at any of it. Nobody optimized the geysers. Nothing about it was recommended to me. The place just existed, and for a few hours so did I. In recent memory, it was the most alive I've felt.
Today I opened my phone and everything was back. Minneapolis. The flan lady. Wildfire smoke. AI articles. Memes. Someone's engagement photos. Someone's cancer diagnosis. A recipe I'll never cook. A war I'll never understand. All of it stacked together with the same visual weight, begging for attention.
The world is both incredibly beautiful and increasingly sad. It always has been. It just used to come at us one thing at a time. I keep waiting for it to pick one — beautiful or sad — maybe make it easy for me to know whether to laugh or despair, but it won't. So I'll keep choosing to laugh.