There is a dissonance between the scale of what’s at stake and the way our public spaces have turned into theatres of self-advertising.

It’s exhausting because the attention economy is designed to reward spectacle: the brighter, angrier, more extreme, the more it circulates. The calm, the nuanced, the grieving, the genuinely connective get buried.

It helps a little to name what’s happening without turning it into proof that we’re hopeless:

• Social media algorithms amplify emotion, not understanding.

• Post-pandemic anxiety and economic precarity have made self-promotion feel like survival.

• Our nervous systems are still catching up; we mistake exposure for connection.

If you are feeling alienated, you’re not broken! You’re intact enough to notice.

You can keep that integrity by choosing how you participate:

• Step out of the “look-at-me” cycle; share when you have something real to contribute or simply to witness.

• Give your attention to people and projects that are creative, that heal, or make beauty, small, local, unglamorous.

• Touch the physical world often; the body re-calibrates truth faster than the feed.

“We are all dying, why can’t we see it?” echoes in my body. This isn’t despair; it’s a reminder of how alive we still are to what matters.

This poem “After the Filters” is for all of those who are alive.

After the Filters

Some days I scroll and feel like I’m watching a costume party at the end of the world.

Every face polished.

Every word optimised.

Every heartbreak turned into content.

After everything

After the losses, and the empty streets,

I thought we might remember what matters.

Instead, the noise got louder.

More filters.

More slogans.

More wars, more lies, more pretending that performance equals purpose.

I keep asking:

Are we the only species that doesn’t learn?

Are we so addicted to being seen

that we’ve forgotten how to see?

Beneath the gloss, I still believe something real is trying to breathe through us.

A hunger for honesty.

For slow presence.

For unfiltered aliveness.

Maybe “after the filters” isn’t a time we wait for.

Maybe it’s a choice

to show up, raw and imperfect,

and remember that to be human

was never meant to be a brand.

You can download more poems in defiance of what rules us, to lit up our souls here. A renewal of old myths, old narratives and obsolete systems.

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