How We Forgot to Be Human

How to Be Human — A Three-Part Series on How Women are Losing Their Humanity

There is a kind of violence that never announces itself. No gunfire, no banners, no moment where someone can point and say — there. That’s where it happened. Instead it moves surgically through daily life, rewiring what we expect from each other and ourselves until what was once unthinkable becomes invisible. I watched it happen to me for years before I could name it.

The collapse of civil dialogue, the monetization of outrage, the replacement of genuine connection with curated content — none of this arrived by accident. These are the logical outcomes of systems built for scale, designed to extract rather than nourish. What looks like cultural decline is actually cultural reconfiguration, a deliberate restructuring of human experience to serve algorithmic parameters and market imperatives. Technology didn’t invent the hunger for control over other people’s attention. But it supercharged it beyond anything we were equipped to metabolize.

Today, algorithms don’t just recommend entertainment. They shape emotional baselines and weaponize identity. Behavioral tracking isn’t an occasional breach of privacy — it’s the engine of modern economics. On TikTok alone, content related to “trauma” saw a 248% increase in views between 2020 and 2023. What was once a deeply personal, unwieldy process of healing is now public spectacle, trending aesthetic, algorithmic currency. The inner world — once private, tender, impossible to flatten — has been turned inside out for consumption.

The Fracture, Up Close

In January of 2025, demonstrators at Texas State University stood holding signs that read: “Types of Property: Women, Slaves, Animals, Land, Etc.” They weren’t misquoted. They weren’t taken out of context. They were making a deliberate claim that hierarchy and ownership are ordained, righteous even. I sat with that image for days, not because it shocked me but because of how quickly the cycle moved on. Outrage, screenshot, share, forget. The machinery of attention consumed it and produced nothing.

It would be comforting to call that an outlier. But it’s the visible edge of something we’ve all been swimming in — a culture that has normalized domination at every level. Of bodies, of attention, of emotions, of truth itself. The extremism on that campus is a louder version of the same logic running quietly through the rest of our lives, the logic that says efficiency matters more than empathy, performance more than presence, extraction more than understanding.

The Part We Don’t Want to Say

Here is the uncomfortable truth I keep returning to:

Systems didn’t do this to us alone. We participated. We let it happen. Sometimes we chose it.

I chose it — spent years optimizing myself into someone the algorithm could recognize, measuring my worth in metrics that had nothing to do with being alive. I confused being productive with being present, being visible with being known. That’s not a system failure, that’s a human one.

As women, we traded the messy, mysterious work of being human for the false promise that our suffering could be engineered away if we just hacked ourselves properly. We stopped asking what it means to be in right relationship with ourselves, with each other, with the world. Instead we started asking how to survive the system without losing everything — or worse, how to win inside it. And somewhere in that shift, we forgot that being human was never supposed to be something we had to remember.

The Quiet Rebellion

Being human now is an act of rebellion, which is a sentence that should embarrass all of us. But here we are. The rebellion isn’t loud. It looks like noticing when your attention has been hijacked. It looks like refusing the belief that you must constantly upgrade yourself to remain worthy. It looks like rebuilding the muscle memory of empathy and curiosity and self-awareness — capacities that have atrophied in a world that rewards their absence.

This is not nostalgia for some imagined golden age. And I’m not interested in performing change while the real work goes undone. What I’m describing is the urgent, unglamorous process of remembering who and what we were before the noise and the extraction. The project ahead is not technological. It’s psychological. It’s the reclamation of capacities that make a fully human life possible — capacities we will need more than ever as the systems accelerate.

What did you trade away so slowly you didn’t notice it was gone?