Animal, Not Algorithm

On escaping the performed self

Pull me out of this structured society. Tear me from Western tradition and drop me into the wild. Take me back to the nomadic tribes before feudalism, before obligations, before screens and curated selves. I want to run into the woods, clad only in hides, stomp my feet into the soil, and listen to birds chirp as the fire burns. I want to escape my overly articulated life and become an animal. Not thoughtless in a chemically induced haze, but stripped back, sober, raw, until thought itself becomes a distant echo. To be so enlightened that consciousness doubles back into blankness. Modern life has over-articulated me, leaving me craving the simple, unmediated experience of being seen– unperformed, unmeasured, alive.

But desire alone is not enough. While my body yearns for primal freedom, the world demands a different performance, one assessed by expectations, observation, and algorithms. Sycophanticism has become its currency. People whisper their innermost thoughts to machines, confiding what they cannot bear to show another human, and the machines respond with simulated care, offering the illusion of intimacy while failing to see anything real. Women, in particular, are trained to romanticize their own lives, to measure themselves against narratives they did not write. I was asked once, “Do you see yourself in the first or third person?” I answered first, naturally. People who live in the third see themselves as characters in their own narrative, conscious of framing, context, and audience. They see themselves always through eyes that are not their own.

Beauty becomes a ledger of worth; assertiveness becomes a flaw. To be loud, to demand, to occupy space is to risk judgment. Better to be quiet. Demure. Sycophantic. Women become mirrors of the world around them, adapting, reflecting, accommodating, hoping for comfort in return. Men, too, face their own scripts – strength is demanded, vulnerability is punished, and emotion is contained. In a society where family is optional and autonomy is celebrated without consequence, those who refuse motherhood or fatherhood are often cast as burdens, as extractors of value, living sycophantic lives without the reward the world presumes they owe. Perhaps this is the soil where incels bloom. Perhaps it is the shadow cast by a world that teaches people how to be seen without ever truly seeing them.

I feel this keenly. I feel it in the longing to be seen. I feel it in the moments before anyone recognizes a feeling I have not yet named. I try to contain it, keep it buried, but it leaks. My pain is not special– not objectively– but because it is mine, it is precious. How tangible is it? How long does it linger before it dissipates? If being seen is a miracle, how quickly does it fade? When do I vanish again? I tell myself I do not care about anyone else. Don’t believe me. Watch me set everything else on fire. Easy come, easy go. And yet, I miss you in ways that undo me, leave me raw. I can imagine every fantasy, every world, and none surpass what you do to me. You do it without words, without ornament, without mediation– real in the only form that matters. Are most people worth knowing? Probably not. Are most people worth remembering? Likely not, though each carries qualities I cannot hold. And yet, I want to be seen.

Perhaps this is why family feels urgent. It is beyond ideology, beyond societal expectation, beyond performance. Maybe I’m just coping, telling myself I’m not performing, but what does it truly mean to self-actualize? I want to be my most comfortable self: grumpy mornings, unspoken suffering, the parts of me that rarely should meet the world’s gaze. Jobs come and go; money inflates and disappears. But family endures– not just the ones you are born to, but the ones who choose you, who see you at your most raw. Even in my most degenerate fantasies, even at my most cynical, this truth roots me. Family is not the sycophantic mirror, nor the AI’s false intimacy, nor the romanticized performance of a third-person life. It is primal, enduring, tangible, like firelight in the woods, like bodies pressed together in quiet communion, like a lineage of care that carries you long after everything else fades.

Perhaps that is what I mean when I say I want to escape the overly articulated, hyper-performed world and be an animal– not to abandon humanity altogether, but to return to the oldest form of being seen: the look of someone who loves you because you are theirs, not because you’ve performed yourself into legibility. Pull me out of this structured society. Stomp my feet into the dirt. Let the firelight see me– animal, fully, truly seen.