It's Not Avocado Toast. It's Not Boomers. It's Not Even Algorithms.

If you haven’t heard of Bryan Johnson yet, he’s worth checking out as an example of everything that’s wrong with the world. A tech entrepreneur worth $300 million, he decided that instead of using his wealth to make the world a better place, he’s going on a different journey. He’s going to become immortal. At one point, he harvested a liter of his son’s blood for plasma therapy.

Johnson is in his late 40s.

Now, let’s talk about looksmaxing—an internet subculture that’s gotten a lot of attention lately. The extreme version of it refers to unhinged and sometimes illegal pursuits to enhance your physical appearance. Most of the leaders in this little movement are in their 20s and 30s. They’re zoomers.

And now finally, let’s talk about Ronald Reagan, the man who kick-started many of the world’s current problems and initiated our descent into the current dystopian hellscape. He belongs to “the greatest generation.”

Millennials like me often feel like we got one of the rawest deals in history. Many of us graduated from college and entered the workforce during the Great Recession. Just as we were finally getting our feet under us, a pandemic came along and pulled the rug out. We’ve been in freefall ever since. For the last few years, the statistics have been landing hard. Many of us will never own a home. If we do, we’ll live in constant fear of losing it and winding up homeless, no matter how hard we work. We don’t expect to ever retire. We don’t expect to ever have affordable healthcare. From life expectancy to trust in public institutions, all the numbers are going in the wrong direction. Every day, we wake up to stories shaming us.

Many younger people are deeply angry, filled with despair, and looking for someone to blame. The mainstream media knows this, and so they churn out a steady stream of articles that target our online spaces, talking about how older generations (boomers in particular) are hoarding our wealth.

And yet, who is actually hoarding our wealth?

It includes members of our own generation.

We have the Kardashians. We have Mark Zuckerberg. We have Sam Altman. All those tech bros out there pushing data centers and artificial intelligence? Quite a few of them come from our own beleaguered generation.

They’re millennials.

Every generation has its own greedy individuals, its outlier movements, and its contributions to the bleak state of the world. And every generation probably feels like they’ve had it the hardest.

Every so often, we go through a cycle. The internet fills our feeds with stories trashing us for not living within our means and daring to talk about our struggles. Last week, the algorithms showed me a handful of stories telling me that my problem isn’t capitalism, it’s my attitude. I should just sell everything and move into a 600-square-foot house on the plains. It was written by someone who has never lived on the plains. Meanwhile, I have. Yeah, it’s a lot cheaper out there. There’s also a lot of reasons why some of us eventually choose to leave.

Here’s the really interesting part:

While the algorithms were getting me worked up over my alleged avocado toast and Starbucks habit, something else was happening to many of my senior colleagues. The algorithms were filling up their feeds with a very different set of stories blaming them for the world’s problems and accusing them of hoarding wealth. They got very justifiably upset, because guess what?

Most of them aren’t rich.

Many of them are simply doing okay, but we live in a world where doing okay looks like immense privilege to someone who isn’t doing okay.

We live on the edge of a sword. If we don’t talk about our struggles, everyone assumes we don’t have any. If we ever open up and admit that life is hard, well, nobody wants to hear that either. They tell you to “buck up.”

You just can’t win.

You’ve got to wonder who it serves to keep every generation at each other’s throats, constantly pointing fingers over the world’s problems. Perhaps it benefits the tech bros and their families. We’ll never unify against them as long as we’re busy trolling each other and getting offended.

Researchers have been documenting this effect for years. A recent article in the Journal of Public Economics puts it right out there:

Algorithms care about engagement.

Not truth.

They describe a “feedback loop between user behavior and ranking visibility.” In other words, algorithms don’t make decisions based on the quality or depth of an article. How could they? Algorithms are best at tracking clicks. Platforms have tried to make them do otherwise, but that leads you into a really messy debate over personal opinions about quality, and it reintroduces gatekeepers. I’ve watched a long line of CEOs try to escape the algorithms, only to end up promoting a version of what they said they were against. So, there’s no magic answer.

Algorithms will continue to serve up what we like. If you could talk to an algorithm, I bet it would tell you it’s awfully confused. Because humans often treat things they hate the same way they treat things they like. The algorithms want to make us happy, but we don’t often engage in behavior that makes us unhappy, and algorithms can’t tell the difference. The tech lords in charge of the algorithms don’t care about this problem. For them, engagement is engagement, and engagement is money. We’re a very confusing species—and highly profitable.

So, algorithms think you and I want to sit around reading stories that trigger our emotions. Why would they think that?

Because we engage with it.

Lately, I’ve felt and observed this phenomenon firsthand. I know it’s true. We just got served up a big batch of “generation war” stories.

Older generations admitted that these stories make them want to give up, to stop trying to help anyone younger than them because they won’t express any acknowledgment or gratitude whatsoever. They’ll just keep fuming. I’ve felt that same sense of futility reading the articles that cast aside my lifetime of dedication to education and frame my problems as personal failures.

That’s the point.

This cycle of strife seems to erupt before major elections, almost on cue. That would make sense. After all, the super rich certainly still care about elections enough to try and influence or rig them, if only to make it easier to maintain the illusion of democracy a little longer. Maybe you could write that off as a conspiracy theory several years ago, but now? The billionaires own all the newspapers. They own all the social media platforms. It makes perfect sense. Maybe they don’t even fully realize what they’re doing, but they’re still doing it.

Now would be the time to start pushing out a bunch of misleading, sensational clickbait articles that infuriate anyone who might be trying to build coalitions. It gives them plenty of time to go viral, to sink in, to resonate, to harden stereotypes and reinforce divides between groups.

We often talk about the tendency of these articles to oversimplify issues and advance stereotypes. What if these aren’t accidental shortcomings?

What if they were the goal?

Let’s be clear, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t sitting around talking about all this while stroking hairless cats and daydreaming about doomsday lasers. They don’t have to. They’ve simply built a system that rewards content creators for generating controversies and running every idea through a bullhorn or a slop engine to make sure it’s legible to algorithms. As readers, we fall into this trap and share the articles that either validate our righteous indignation or feed our rage. This behavior stacks, and it produces the intended result.

Instead of helping each other, we fight.

We fight and fight.

Here’s a feeling you probably know:

Well, eff them. If all I’m going to get is trashed for my privilege, lectured about my naivety, and told I’m the one making the world worse, maybe I’ll just quit trying altogether. Maybe I’ll just do nothing and see how they like that. I won’t cooperate with them. I won’t support them. I’ll do nothing. I’ll just let the fascists win, and we’ll suffer in this dystopia together. We’ll see how they like that.

The super rich folks who control the algorithms love it when you feel this way, regardless of what they say in Entrepreneur or Inc. They want parents against their children. They want children against their parents. They want men against women and vice versa. They want optimists against doomers.

It’s hard to build actual unity when, so often, the word “unity” is simply code for strongarming someone into adopting their beliefs and voting for the things they want. I’m not talking about that kind of unity.

I’m trying to talk about the real thing.

Maybe it looks like this: You vote if you want, but you don’t judge anyone else for what they do with their vote. You just encourage everyone to make a decision about what to do with their vote. That would be a good start. That sounds like a good example of a unifying statement.

It’s hard.

In fact, there’s probably nothing harder than putting aside your anger or your need for validation, especially if you were right about something and nobody listened to you. Boy, have I been there. It’s an awful feeling. It really sucks to find yourself drowning in evidence that you got it 90 percent right, but it doesn’t matter, because admitting you were right would cost everyone else too much self-esteem. I’ve learned something firsthand over the last couple of years, and I’m still processing it.

Being right about something actually makes people like you less.

That goes double if you were right about something big, and everyone else vehemently disagreed with you. My own experiences confirm what psychology says. Our need for that validation often drives even the smartest of us to abandon that little nugget of truth and strive for the validation anyway.

It backfires.

By the way: There’s a big difference between someone who was wrong and someone who lied. You can forgive someone who was wrong. You don’t have to, but you can. It’s not so simple for someone who lied. Neither is it that simple for someone who tried to hurt you. They have to prove they can be trusted first. But that’s a different article. Here, we’re talking about people who just screwed up.

Anyway…

The algorithms elevate this deep desire to be right, even though it only ever seems to ingratiate us with the ones who already agreed while alienating everyone else. They push the most confident stories. They show us the articles written with certainty, not the ones with hedges and qualifications.

The algorithms know you like this. They know you like to feel validated, and they sense that you don’t get enough of it in your “real” life. So it showers you with validation online. They want all of us to feel validated, at the expense of each other and the larger truths. In the end, the internet often winds up amplifying the worst of us. It’s ironic that the tool that was supposed to make connection easier has also fueled so much division and strife, but that’s how it works.

So, when these stories come across your feed, I’m not telling you to ignore them. I’m not even telling you not to share them. I mean, come on. I live in the real world. I know you’re going to share them.

We all like to sound off. It’s even good for us.

But…

While you’re complaining about that poorly written, divisive, overly simplistic article that bashes you for your avocado toast or blames you for hoarding wealth, you might want to remember the bigger truth. This article was written and shared explicitly to make you feel indignant while validating someone else. Or it was written to validate you while making someone else indignant.

As psychologists have shown us, our own brains often struggle to distinguish between wholesome joy and righteous anger. They produce the same chemicals. So, how could we possibly expect an algorithm to get it?

So when you respond to the article, which is your right, and fills a need deeply rooted in your psyche, don’t stop at the clapback. Don’t just take the (click)bait. Point to the larger machine running behind that article. Talk about the bad arguments and poor logic. Also, talk about the echo chambers and information ecosystems responsible for these bad articles and the urge to write them.

They want us against each other.

It’s how they win.

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