Consume and Move On.
Consume and Move On
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how much of modern life revolves around extraction. This isn’t just material extraction like land, labour, money and resources but a quieter psychological one that seems to permeate every aspect of our existence. Attention, emotion, identity, creativity, and even grief, intimacy, spirituality, and selfhood are increasingly becoming packaged, circulated, and consumed as commodities. It’s as if we’ve gradually forgotten how to simply be present in life, becoming so conditioned to seek what can be taken from it instead.
Perhaps this explains why so many feel perpetually overstimulated yet, simultaneously, strangely undernourished. We consume endlessly – information, opinions, trends, aesthetics, personalities, therapies, identities, outrage, inspiration, self-help, spirituality and content. The pace is relentless: consume, scroll, react, move on. And somewhere within this rhythm, I can’t help but wonder if we’ve slowly confused consumption with participation.
Because they are not the same thing.
To truly participate in something demands presence, relationship, and the willingness to be transformed by encountering and reflecting, rather than simply seeking stimulation before moving on. However, our world increasingly prioritises immediacy over intimacy. We skim rather than contemplate, and we absorb fragments rather than digest meaning. We gather information without necessarily allowing wisdom to take root.
Perhaps this conditioning begins much earlier than we realise. Children naturally look outward for guidance, arriving in the world without the skills to navigate it alone. They turn to parents, teachers, and other authority figures for help in understanding reality, safety, belonging, and identity. Which is perfectly normal and part of human development. Yet I sometimes wonder whether many adults ever fully outgrow this instinct to seek certainty, validation, and direction from something outside themselves.
Authority figures have proliferated exponentially. Once, they were kings, priests, Hollywood stars, athletes, and musicians. Now they are influencers, algorithms, online personalities, self-proclaimed experts, motivational speakers, wellness gurus, political commentators, and digital tribes. The forms have shifted, but the psychological mechanisms often remain remarkably similar. Please tell me what matters, what’s true, what beauty looks like, what success means, and who I should become.
Perhaps this is where the modern world becomes particularly alluring. Never before have humans had such instant access to external guidance. We can reach into our pockets and receive endless streams of advice, performance predictions, explanations and interpretations. Yet amid this convenience, I wonder whether another capacity quietly diminishes through disuse.
It’s instinct, discernment, inner listening. The ability to sit with uncertainty long enough to encounter life directly rather than immediately seeking someone else’s interpretation.
I notice this increasingly online. People consume human opinions, styles and personalities in much the same way they consume products. A person’s pain becomes content, their wisdom becomes branding and their creativity becomes something to quickly extract value from before moving on to the next voice, trend or emotional hit. Rarely do people pause to consider the invisible labour beneath their consumption. The years of solitude behind the insight, the lived experience beneath the words and the emotional cost of articulation itself. We consume the meal without considering who planted the field, carried the water or stood over the fire preparing it.
Perhaps this explains why gratitude feels increasingly threatened in modern culture. It disrupts extraction. Gratitude slows the nervous system down long enough to recognise relationships. Someone made it, someone carried it, someone suffered for its knowledge and someone devoted years to understanding it in seconds. Without gratitude, everything begins to feel disposable: information, art, people, even identity itself. It’s almost as if “consume and move on” has become the unspoken mantra of our age.
We, humans, weren’t ever meant to live solely through extraction; it can’t nourish the soul. Eventually, endless consumption creates a strange inner starvation no amount of stimulation can fix. People keep scrolling yet feel emptier and keep purchasing yet feel disconnected. They absorb knowledge but increasingly struggle to find wisdom within themselves. Perhaps this is because nourishment always demands something slower than consumption – participation, attention, reciprocity, relationships, digestion, and a willingness to feel deeply. It requires depth of understanding rather than simply regurgitating information that has only been absorbed mentally. So the question remains: can you truly live it out in real life and maintain the consistency of knowing and practice after if you have not fully embodied it?
And maybe this is why so many people now feel exhausted beneath the surface of modern life. Not because they are incapable of depth, but because the structures around them continually reward fragmentation. The modern world teaches us to move, react, identify, consume and discard quickly. Yet the soul, if such a thing exists, seems to move to entirely different rhythms. Forests do not rush. Rivers do not rush. Seasons do not rush. Meaning itself does not rush.
Perhaps this explains why genuine encounters have become so rare. They demand what modern culture struggles to tolerate: slowness, presence, reflection, and the willingness to linger beyond initial stimulation. Perhaps this is where true remembering begins, not through consumption or endless searching, but by rediscovering the forgotten ability to remain present with what’s already here long enough for life’s language to resurface.
It’s sometimes fascinating to hear people passionately discuss the dangers of AI online while simultaneously existing within systems entirely governed by it. Not only is this about edited photos, filters, or obvious artificial imagery, but also about the very structure itself. The phone recording the video already contains AI, and the platform distributing it relies on it. The algorithm that decides who sees it, how long they watch, and whether it reaches an audience or disappears into obscurity is AI. Even the outrage itself becomes data feeding the system it claims to reject.
Many people still speak about AI as if it’s an external force rather than recognising its deep integration into modern life. What’s even more fascinating is how quickly people become emotionally certain about things they’ve barely explored beyond a surface reaction. We live in a culture where a two-minute reel passes for research and emotional resonance quietly replaces contemplation.
If something triggers recognition, people often mistake that feeling for truth.
“That feels right to me” becomes “this must be true.”
However, understanding demands far more than agreement; it requires digestion, contradiction, reflection, observation and the willingness to embrace complexity long enough for deeper insights to emerge beyond mere reaction. Consequently, many people no longer seek synthesis as it involves time and uncertainty. Inheriting conclusions feels far more comfortable than arriving at them honestly through direct experience.
Perhaps this explains the power of repetition in modern culture. Repeating something frequently eventually leads people to stop questioning its origin. They simply adopt the narrative because it seems widely accepted. Fashion, politics, social media and even spirituality and self-development increasingly follow this pattern. We’re constantly told what beauty, success, authenticity, intelligence, healing and truth are. Over time, this collective agreement begins to blur into reality itself.
I believe this is why so many people struggle with genuine self-knowledge. It’s not a lack of depth but the way modern life rewards an external orientation. We’re taught to seek interpretation before experience, explanation before encounter, and prediction before participation. Tell me who I am. Tell me what this means. Tell me what happens next. There is comfort in being told. And make sure you do it in 2 minutes, because people get bored if they aren’t constantly stimulated. But the biggest issue is being honest with oneself: do you want to take the time to fully know yourself? Because that takes time, it's slow, methodical, and it requires effort to unravel all the narratives you may have accepted as true, only to discover they were never truly you.
I often wonder what humanity remembers of itself after the noise fades. What endures when trends dissolve, identities loosen, performance falls away, and there’s no audience to reflect back on us? Perhaps this is why so many fear silence; it disrupts the constant instruction about who we should become. Ultimately, this isn’t a return to the past but the recovery of a forgotten human ability: the ability to remain. To remain with experience before rushing to interpretation, to remain in silence before seeking explanation, to remain with uncertainty before demanding a conclusion, to remain with the encounter before turning it into an extraction.
This feels like the central tension of modern life. We’ve become exceptionally skilled at accumulation – more information, more opinions, more content, more stimulation, more perspectives arriving faster than any previous generation could have imagined. However, accumulation isn’t the same as assimilation. Assimilation is slower and asks something different. It’s the process where experience becomes understanding, understanding becomes wisdom, and wisdom becomes embodied action. It requires digestion rather than collection – relationship rather than acquisition.
Perhaps this is why the deeper question isn’t how much we know but what truly takes root within us. Beneath the noise of modern culture lies a quieter question: what endures when trends fade, and identities loosen? What remains when performance falters, and there’s no audience to reflect our true selves? It’s not about who I am when everyone agrees or when I’m visible or validated. It’s about who I am when the mirrors disappear. The deeper concern isn’t artificial intelligence, social media algorithms, or technology itself; it’s amnesia.
Humans are becoming increasingly accustomed to external guidance, gradually forgetting their inner authority. Years of being told what matters, what’s true, what’s beautiful, what’s worthy, and who they should be can lead to a loss of touch with the quieter capacities that’ve always existed beneath the noise. These include instinct, discernment, and inner listening – the ability to encounter life directly without needing someone else’s interpretation. Perhaps the solution isn’t withdrawal from modern life, rejection of technology, or longing for a simpler past.
So, now, how do we turn this around rather than blaming AI? Perhaps we should start by addressing ourselves. It begins with reclaiming attention forms that can’t be outsourced: observation, reflection, contemplation, gratitude, and presence. It’s about participating rather than merely consuming. Some forms of knowing are simply lived experiences and can’t be downloaded, inherited, purchased, or performed. Perhaps that’s one of the most radical acts available to us in an age obsessed with perpetual consumption – simply remaining long enough for life to reveal itself before someone else dictates our understanding.
Perhaps remembering starts the moment we pause and stop relying on systems, algorithms, trends, influencers, predictions, and collective agreement to guide us. We need to listen to our own minds clearly again. Perhaps remembering wasn’t ever about becoming something new.
Delahrose Roobie Myer
A scribe, listening to the field.
Author - Fatima’s Alchemy
