Cosmic Junkyard #6: Reality is an algorithm — and we can program it

We have the power to curate what we see online and in real life. Maybe the boundary between the two is thinner than it seems.

Hi everyone. I’ve been on *quite* the internal and external journey lately, and Cosmic Junkyard is switching to a biweekly posting schedule for now simply because I have so many other posts to share over the next few weeks.

I am also very excited about the upcoming Mabon Creativity + Ritual Challenge, which will feature seven prompts sent over 14 days loaded with creative challenges, rituals, and much more. It’s designed to guide you through the transition from summer to fall (and through any transitions you might be going through in your own life).

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Anyways, I hope you enjoy this week’s Cosmic Junkyard. It’s a little bit less focused on a specific question and instead presents an argument, but I’d argue it falls into the “unanswered/unanswerable question” territory as it concerns a concept that we cannot see and must choose to believe in to engage with. Please feel free to leave a comment if anything resonated with you (or didn’t).

Thanks for being here.

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Years ago, in the midst of numbly scrolling through various posts I did not enjoy seeing at all, it suddenly occurred to me that I had the power to curate my social media algorithms.

I actually didn’t have to be looking at pictures of girls from my high school wearing designer clothes and getting engaged. I didn’t have to keep seeing streams of stick-thin models.

In fact, I could actually unfollow, block, and report just a couple dozen posts.

And voila: I remade my world.

Now, I never get any dieting posts or models, and I barely see anyone from my past. Instead, my Instagram feed is full of the eco-spiritual content and insightful memes that I’ve elected to fill it with. I still have a strict 20-minute daily time limit on it to combat the algorithm’s horrifically addictive qualities, but even so, my Instagram is far more nurturing and generative than it used to be.

Substack has been a powerful extension of that, exposing me to an abundance of posts that seem to be direct echoes of the thoughts in my mind. It’s clear evidence that we can actually curate what we see on social media instead of blindly scrolling through it and accepting what comes. Being on Substack has reminded me that is truly possible to make the Internet a more generative, less addictive, more nurturing place.

But this post isn’t really about the internet. It’s about how understanding the art of curating our social media feeds can actually be a wonderful way to examine a much greater ability we all possess, but few of us utilize: We can also curate reality itself.

Whether or not life is a simulation — that’s a topic for a forthcoming post— the “real” world" (whatever that means) certainly does bear some similarities to our Instagram feed, or Substack homepage or email inbox or TikTok ForYou abyss.

For example, we engage with, or in essence follow, certain people by choosing to interact with and engage with them regularly. We also subscribe to specific thought patterns that ultimately make up how we see the world.

Unfortunately, many of us are subscribed to profoundly negative thought patterns: self-criticism, paranoia, distrust.

Have you evaluated whether you’ve consciously chosen the thought patterns you’re subscribed to? Or are you letting the algorithm control you?

Any basic manifestation crash course will tell you that our thoughts create our reality, not the other way around. And while unsubscribing from negative thought patterns and subscribing to more positive ones might take a little more work than simply blocking and deleting content you don’t want to see online, I’d argue that it’s still hard to escape disturbing or unsettling content on the Internet, no matter how much effort you put into creating your reality.

A few quick caveats: I really don’t want to imply that it’s possible, or even advisable, to block out all negative content. We definitely shouldn’t ignore violence or current events entirely. And we simply can’t ignore or unfollow or block some people in our reality (though I’d argue that most of the time, opting into a different worldview or way of seeing them is the same thing).

Oftentimes, of course, our real-world algorithms are heavily curated by things like race and class and random chance and bad luck. Also, over-curating our algorithms (or our worldviews) means that we risk becoming siloed into echo chambers, and if the content we’re subscribing to is harmful, then it becomes harder than ever to escape it. That’s why it’s always important to explore beyond your chosen algorithm from time to time.

Still, I think it’s important to remember that we don’t have to go about this whole living thing blindly, just taking everything as it comes to us and thinking the way we’ve always thought. We do actually have the power to curate what we see.

So how do we do it?

Well, I’ve been studying this for the past two months and I have a bunch of posts in the pipeline about what I’ve learned, but here are some of the most basic tips. First and foremost: Affirmations. Start and end your day with a positive thought. Read Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life and Susan Jeffers’s Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Look at yourself and tell yourself you love and accept yourself every single day. It might feel uncomfortable at first, but it also might change anything.

Also, opting to spend time in nature is critical. So is worship and ritual and developing a relationship with a higher power. So is being selective about who we spend our time with and what we spend our energy on.

Of course, it’s also very important to become aware of of what we are currently subscribed to. Sometimes taking a look at how much shit we’ve been downloading and reading and rereading and rethinking all our lives is unsettling and difficult, but it’s worth it to take a hard look at all of it, if only so you can come out the other side.

So ask questions. Stay aware. Evaluate whether your life path and chosen algorithm is serving you, and change it if you need to. Pay attention to things and people that challenge you.

And then make choices about whether to make them a part of your everyday reality.

What we pay attention to grows, online or off. It’s up to us to either make a choice about what we’re seeing, or stay unconscious and allow our thoughts and purchases and lives to be guided by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg or random chaos and chance and our monkey minds and negativity biases.

Another tip: Subscribe to newsletters that expand your life. (I hope this is one of them, but if not, unsubscribe!) Follow people who enrich your soul and challenge you to be better. Do things that make you grow and help you live well. Question everything. Be open to anything. Do more of what you really want to be doing.

Reality is an algorithm. Our attention is the most powerful form of currency we have, and it’s the key to changing our lives.

There will always be suffering, and we can’t fully ignore or opt out of that, unfortunately, just as we can’t ignore or opt out of messed-up content online. But we can choose whether we doomscroll further into the dark, or whether we embrace our suffering, and take it further into the sunshine, and embrace it, and let it breathe. Every single day, we have that choice.

And as the boundary between our digital and real worlds grows ever-more-porous, it’ll become more and more possible to curate the algorithms that guide our worlds in a way that influences our lives both online and off.

I struggle with all this just as much as anyone. But I’ve personally seen how our thoughts and choices create our reality. It’s incredibly powerful. And once you see it, it’s hard to un-see.

It’s cliche but true: Most of us are living blindly in the Matrix, guided by random algorithms designed by money-hungry tech companies slash money-hungry systems that thrive off our collective unhappiness and lack of fulfillment.

The two pills are here in your hand, and always have been. The next move is your choice. It always is.