My Thumb is Numb

I’ve lost the ability to read a book.

There, I said it. I can hold one, I can admire the cover, I can even read the first page. But then the twitch begins. The phantom scroll. My thumb starts looking for the glassy surface of a screen to glide over, hungry for the next tiny hit of visual novocaine.

This isn’t your grandma’s Facebook doomscrolling. This is a new vintage, refined and cut by our new dealers: the Geminis, the Claudes, the GPTs. They don’t just curate the feed; they are the feed. Every slick, weird, impossibly perfect image, every uncanny video, every listicle that reads like it was written by a ghost who aced its marketing exams… it’s a synthetic high, algorithmically tailored to tickle the exact neuron that keeps you scrolling down the beautiful, colorful, infinite drain.

The scary part is not that the machine-generated content is bad; it’s that it’s becoming just good enough.

Good enough to displace the real thing. Good enough to hold you captive while your attention span atrophies. That little sparkle icon in your search bar? The spiral in your chat window? That’s the free sample. The first hit is always on the house. They lodge the needle right in the vein of your digital life—the Google search, the WhatsApp message, the Photoshop canvas—and start the drip.

We’re scrolling through content designed by non-human intelligence to be maximally addictive to human intelligence. What could go wrong?

I’m starting to think that the ultimate goal of AI isn't to achieve consciousness, but to systematically dismantle ours. To slice it up into a million little content-snack-sized pieces until there’s nothing left but a numb thumb, a glazed-over stare, and the faint, nagging memory of a thought you were about to have.

Your turn: can you still finish a book?