THE MEDIA DIET: YOU ARE WHAT YOU…

Consume

When you look in a mirror, or at your phone screen, do you see yourself — or an image influenced, even projected, for you? When you’re in a store or shopping online, or reading, watching, even thinking about something you’re drawn to — are those truly your thoughts? Your taste?

You might assume your impulses are your own. But think again. Every prompt you stop for and every product you peruse has been carefully selected for you. The influence may begin online, but it doesn’t end there.

Whether it’s a quick click to checkout in the moment, or a purchase later in a store, the seed has already been planted. What happens next is simply impulse control.

Big Tech knows more about you than you know about yourself. Not because it understands your inner life, but because it holds more behavioral data on you and me combined than we could ever imagine.

It records our searches, our scroll speed, where we pause, what we replay, what we hover over and click — or don’t click. It detects patterns we don’t even realize we’re creating — the time of day we’re most impulsive, the tone we react to fastest, the images that hold our attention a fraction longer than the rest.

It doesn’t know your character. But it does know your habits. And habits, repeated, shape a picture of you that becomes your identity.

That’s what got me thinking: are my behaviors being led by something other than me, and leading me toward a different version of myself? Not a great thought. I tend to think of myself as my own person. It’s unsettling to consider how subtly this is happening.

There are so many ways we’re going to continue to feel this personally. One obvious place — and one I find fascinating because it’s already been shaping us for years — is how we consume technology, social media, and shop today, and how these behaviors have become so intertwined. They affect everything from the decisions we make to how we physically and mentally feel. Ultimately, they shape what we think about ourselves. And that has staying power.

When you stop to consider it, technology may have more influence over who we’re becoming than we consciously allow ourselves to admit. It can make us feel a range of emotions, compel us to act, and rewire us on a much deeper level than we fully understand. What that means for our future selves carries broad implications — and I’m only touching the lighter ones here.

IT’S A GAME OF TASTE

But Whose Taste Is It?

Taste is acquired, right? You’re not born with it. It comes with time and influence.

If you read my Substack on taste a few months back, you know taste is our built-in, private curation system. It’s unique to each of us. It shapes what we like, dislike, and even dismiss. It regulates perception and directs our choices — what we read, wear, believe about ourselves, and believe about the world.

Taste is both a personal mirror and a compass. It reflects who we are, and it directs who we become.

That’s where this gets interesting. And concerning.

The organic forces that have always shaped taste — time and influence — are contorted and compressed today. They’ve converged into something faster and far more concentrated, rewiring how we see ourselves and the world.

Time, which is really attention, is snapped up in seconds. We no longer linger over what we see or read. There’s little space for reflection or real consideration. Our brains have been trained over the past decade to respond. And by respond, I mean react.

And we do. Instantly.

Dopamine and serotonin fire quickly, assimilating information and impressions we didn’t even see coming. We initiate preferences through searches, but tech and AI have been quietly collecting them for years, refining them, and feeding them back to us so quickly there’s almost no time for discernment — another key principle from my earlier article.

Here’s the concern: discernment is a human feature, but AI is learning it. It is the catalyst of taste — the mechanism, the yes/no, left/right calculation that processes information and builds identity. It becomes part of our authenticity.

Our ability to distinguish, to judge, even to discriminate thoughtfully, is one of the most remarkable aspects of being human.

The question is this: are we — and by extension our taste — truly distinguishing our preferences anymore?

Is our taste being amplified… or subtly morphed into something not entirely authored by us?

Maybe both.

IT’S GOT YOUR NUMBER

And A Lot More

George Orwell’s Big Brother feels almost analog compared to Big Tech today. Big Brother only watched you. Big Tech sees your future. It predicts you. It’s a whole new ball game.

Algorithms and AI understand your values and, on some level, your character because of the minefield of behavioral data they’ve harvested — every time we’ve mindlessly signed those user agreements on every. single. website or platform we join. It’s immeasurable and largely impossible for us to gauge our digital footprint at this point. But not for them.

For them, the data is quantifiable and, at the same time, priceless. They track our searches, our scroll speed, where we pause, what we replay, what we hover over and click — or don’t click.

They aggregate patterns across billions of interactions and predict behavior with startling precision. They don’t know your inner life (yet), but they do know your habits. And habits, as we know, repeat and shape identity. If Life Architecture tells us anything, it’s this: habits become you.

If you linger on luxury, you’ll see more luxury. If you react to outrage, you’ll see more outrage. If you click on self-optimization, you’ll be served endless improvement narratives. Before long, it can feel like this is simply the world. But it isn’t the world. It’s your loop. It’s not even a slice of the bigger world.

This kind of reinforcement is powerful because it feels like choice. Interests become trained. The algorithm learns what moves you and feeds it back again and again until it feels familiar — until it feels like you.

Your expectations shift. Your definition of beauty, ambition, success shifts too because the inputs are always recalibrating. And because it all happens gradually, it feels organic.

That’s the mold your scroll is shaping you into.

The damnedest thing is we can’t opt out of the era we’re living in. There’s no escaping it. Participation is inevitable — and I’m not sure we’d want it any other way.

Awareness, then, may be our best defense. The more educated we are as consumers, the more thoughtfully we can respond to systems far larger than us.

YOUR SCROLL IS THE MOLD

The Taste Hijack

When we use our taste — when we make aesthetic judgments, whether we’re admiring a painting, evaluating a face, or responding to a piece of music — the brain activates the orbitofrontal cortex, a region tied to reward and valuation. Beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder; it’s computed in the circuitry of our brains.

Even more striking, recent studies show that aesthetic preference recruits the default mode network — the very system associated with self and identity. In other words, when we say, “this is my taste,” we’re not being metaphorical. Taste is a neural signature of selfhood.

That’s why awareness around what we consume, and where we repeatedly place our attention, couldn’t be more important. It’s not just a matter of surveillance or data mining at stake. It’s unwelcome influence. Quiet, cumulative influence.

When your scroll is repetitive, your brain becomes repetitive. When your inputs narrow, your sense of self can narrow with them.

Taste is never neutral. It’s identity in motion, constantly reinforced by what we accept or reject. And what we scroll carries information — about who we are, and who we’re becoming.

I’m simply suggesting we become more selective about what we consume. Because it’s formative.

MEDIA BUFFET

A Food-Frenzy Environment

I often talk about how our environment shapes us. Our digital environment may now be one of the most powerful ones we inhabit.

The challenge is that this one is curated by systems designed to keep us engaged, not to keep us balanced. While home is meant to be a stabilizing environment, the digital ecosystem is more like a giant buffet: constant choice, constant novelty. Not a lot of nourishment, just constant grazing.

And therein lies the challenge. If your algorithm continually inundates you with one aesthetic, one political lens, one body type, one version of achievement, your subconscious absorbs it. What you see daily becomes bias. It becomes standard. It becomes normal — to you.

We assume identity is internal. But it is deeply environmental. Our digital world can influence us very much like our physical one.

I’ve noticed this in myself. When my feed leans heavily into productivity and ambition, I feel an urgency to do more — even when I’m happy with the work already done. When I consume too much political commentary, creativity contracts. It becomes harder to design beauty when the world feels overwhelming.

But other times, when I’m consciously in my real environment and zeroed in on something — work, exercise, thoughtful conversation, even writing this Substack — I feel expanded. Calm.

Inspired.

This contrast alone tells me that staying rooted in our real environments is a balance we’re going to have to prioritize as technology continues to expand in our lives. Awareness and discipline around our media diet aren’t optional. They’re essential if we want to remain stewards of our own taste.

EAT MUCH?

The New Consumer Diet

We all love the convenience of online shopping. A scroll becomes an adventure. A campaign feels transporting — a glimpse of a new identity that becomes a craving. Comparison creates want. A click becomes fast gratification.

If you see something enough times, it begins to feel necessary. The algorithm studies what you linger on and amplifies it until wanting feels justified.

What fascinates me is how appetite is being engineered. Not hunger — appetite.

We’re constantly being fed images of what to buy, how to look, what to improve. Repetition doesn’t just influence spending. It recalibrates desire.

That shift is physiological. The nervous system adapts to what it repeatedly consumes. If you flood it with novelty, outrage, comparison, your baseline shifts. Satisfaction begins to require more stimulation.

You can eat beautifully — clean salads, whole foods, thoughtful meals — and still overstimulate your brain for hours. You can care about inflammation in your body and ignore inflammation in your mind. We separate mental health from physical health, but the body does not.

It’s simple biology. It operates at a cellular level.

Knowing all of this doesn’t require deleting everything. It requires restraint. Discernment. The willingness to pause before purchasing — or before absorbing — and ask whether the appetite is real. Whether it’s actually yours.

The bigger question is this: are you consuming junk food — or something that truly enriches you?

CONSUMER AGENCY

The Only Taste You Need

We understand online surveillance. As unsettling as it is, we know every platform watches, measures, and analyzes us. That reality carries weight, but what matters most is how we choose to respond.

Agency, to me, is ownership. It’s remembering that taste is still yours — if you slow down enough to claim it. In a world engineered for immediacy, there is quiet power in restraint. In pausing before purchasing. In sitting with a thought before reacting. In allowing uncertainty before rushing to certainty.

Discernment requires time — even if only a little. And time is the one thing modern life constantly pressures us to surrender.

We may not control the forces shaping our feeds or the velocity at which AI is headed our way, but we can control the pace at which we absorb it. We can decide what earns our attention, what we internalize, and what we allow to define normal.

Perhaps that’s the most important consumer decision we make — not what we buy, but what we permit to shape our taste, our identity, and ultimately, the architecture of our lives.

I still believe we know ourselves. We just have to slow down long enough to ensure the voice guiding us is our own— and to remain rooted in the real world.

Here’s to beauty— in art, in conversation, in music, and in love— all the tangible and not-so-tangible things that make us most human.