Your Obedience to the Algorithm Is the Quietest Form of Self-Betrayal
Every Time You Ask 'Will People Read This?' Instead of 'Is This True?' You Narrow Something Inside
A person from two-dimensional space can look down at a person living in one dimension and say: “You’re trapped.”
The one-dimensional person looks up. Their expression isn’t anger, and it isn’t wounded pride. It’s genuine confusion: “Trapped? I’m moving just fine.”
Both of them are right. But they are not speaking from the same world.
This is what Marcuse wrote in One-Dimensional Man. He said: a person who truly lives inside one dimension cannot feel that they are constrained — not because they’re being evasive, not because they’ve gone numb, but because perceiving a constraint requires having the concept of another dimension in the first place. You need to know what “left” is before you can want to go left. But if that direction has never existed in your world, you won’t feel its absence. It simply never was.
I stopped on that page for a long time. There was wind outside the window. I didn’t move.
Because I suddenly realized: I don’t necessarily have the standing to look down at the person who says I’m moving just fine. How do I know I’m not him in some places? I thought I was reading this passage with two-dimensional eyes. But maybe in certain things, I too live in a room with only one direction — moving just fine.
I write things, and after I send them out, I watch the numbers.
This, in itself, isn’t strange. You do something and you want to know if it landed. That’s just human. At first it was a quick glance. Then it became waiting — waiting through the first hour after posting, waiting through the first day, waiting to see if the algorithm would give it another push on day three. When the numbers were good, something in my body would loosen, like someone had patted me on the shoulder and said: not bad. When the numbers were flat, that same something would quietly sink a little, trailing a vague unease — Was it not good enough? Was the timing wrong? Am I still so far from where I need to be?
Once, I wrote a piece. The numbers were average. I sat there and did a serious post-mortem: was the angle off, did the opening hook, was it too convoluted, was it too long. I was thorough about it. It looked right.
But then a thought surfaced that made me stop.
When I wrote that piece, I had a feeling I rarely have — not the feeling of sitting there squeezing words out, grinding toward a word count until it’s technically done, but something else. Something coming from the inside, and I was just following it. Sometimes while writing, I didn’t even know what the next sentence would be, and then it arrived. When I finished and read it back, a quiet voice inside said: yes. Not good — yes. Like there was something I actually wanted to say, and for once, I had barely touched the edge of it.
That feeling and the number of likes are not the same category of thing.
But in that moment, I used the number of likes to invalidate that feeling. And I didn’t notice I was doing it. I thought I was being objective. What I was actually doing was measuring something with a ruler that can’t measure it — and then concluding: this thing isn’t good enough.
You can be shaken to your core, or you can be mildly amused. But in that system, these two things are completely equivalent — the same like, the same number, the same event.
An experience that took you three days — that moved through you slowly, shifting and rearranging something inside — and an experience that made you laugh for three seconds while scrolling: in that system, they are the same thing. One like each. One valid data point each. Both filed under “positive user engagement.” It’s not that platforms don’t want to distinguish them. It’s not that the algorithm is lazy. It’s that the architecture of that system never had that dimension built in. Like a ruler that can’t measure color — not because the ruler is broken, but because it was never made for that.
So it wasn’t that my writing wasn’t good enough. It’s that the ruler wasn’t measuring for that.
But if you stare at that ruler long enough, you begin to feel: only what it measures is real. What it can’t measure — is that my own delusion? Am I being sentimental? Is that feeling of something “coming from the inside” not actually worth anything? Is it just a story I’ve been telling myself?
That is what makes the room truly dangerous.
Not that it locks any doors. But that it teaches you to see your own experience through its eyes.
There’s a word in Russian: душа.
In Chinese it gets translated as “soul” — which sounds a little abstract, a little poetic, the kind of word you’d use in an essay. But my Russian friend told me it doesn’t have that texture in Russian. When Russians say a person has душа, they’re not complimenting his artistic sensibility. They’re saying he has something genuinely interior — that what he does comes from that place, not from performance, not from calculation. When they say a piece of music has душа, they mean something in the music is actually alive, that you can feel a person in there, not just technique.
She told me it’s very hard to fake. You’ve met people who say all the right things, every sentence polished — and when they’re done, you feel empty. That’s the absence of душа. You’ve also met people who say nothing remarkable, and yet when they’re done, something has quietly touched you. That’s it.
Душа doesn’t give you likes. It doesn’t give you data. It doesn’t tell you whether you’re doing well. What it does is this: when you drift from it, quietly, stubbornly, somewhere in your body — something becomes uncomfortable. Like a built-in compass that never speaks, but registers every time you go off course.
It’s proof that you haven’t yet walked all the way into the one-dimensional room. It’s proof that you still carry another dimension inside you.
But it can be worn down.
Not gone in a single day. Narrowed, little by little — so gradually you don’t notice it changing. Every time you use data to measure the feeling of something “coming from the inside,” it narrows a little. Every time you ignore the not right and keep going, it goes a little quieter. Every time you ask “will people read this” instead of “is this true,” it retreats a little further. Press it down deep enough, long enough, and you begin to think the feeling was always vague, always unreliable, always just self-delusion. And then one day you find that whatever you do, it goes smoothly — the numbers are decent — but something isn’t there anymore. You can’t name what it is. You just notice, dimly, a kind of hollowness.
By then, you’re moving just fine.
You’re standing in the one-dimensional room, and you don’t feel like anything is missing.
But that thing inside you that says not right — it’s still there.
When did you last hear it?
You don’t have to answer now. But it’s worth stopping, quietly, and looking for it.
If you can still find it, that means it’s still there.