Optimise for FUN

Tips on breaking free from the algorithmic snoozefest

"Everything is boring now," a former colleague once told me. And I took that personally. At first. But their words kept itching away at me, because maybe they weren't talking about post-pandemic company culture nor the freedom of their twenties slipping away. Lately I’ve been wondering if they were getting at something much, much bigger than all that.

When you’re not in survival mode and have a sec to look around, you might see that we're digitally existing in a sea of sameness. Identical grids. Formulaically hyped collabs. Work sucks (I know) and we create cookie-cutter content that feels generated in pursuit of the same search terms (if I have to read another ‘What Trump’s X means for Y’ headline again, I’ll riot.) And shopping online - aka the easiest dopamine fix since 2006 - is a monotonous scroll through same old product pages.

Y’ll even Ibiza looks boring now. We've optimised ourselves to boredom.

Now, I’ll be honest, better folks have written about the flattening impact of our …