Every headline you read about another person, I want you to make personal.
Yikes—that sounds like the opposite of what we are often told to protect our own peace and find acceptance.
Good. Because peace built on distance and displacement is closer to dissociation, a deadening of life. I’m interested in life. I think you are too.
Every euphemism.
“Reduction in force.”
Every number.
“300,000 Federal Layoffs Announced.”
Every label that stands where a name should be.
“Fascist.”
So far away.
When we see a category instead of a life, when we read numbers instead of faces, we consent to the conditions that made the erasure possible.
We reduce or eliminate our capacity to be moved. The willingness to be touched by what we witness.
For many of us, this stopped being a conscious choice a long time ago. It’s survival.
Imagine if we actually felt the toll of every breaking news story. If we noticed the thousands of cars in the morning traffic we’re caught in weren’t just metal machines in the way, but human beings who’d rather be home, doing something they love, or simply getting some sleep. If we caught the microexpression on the barista’s face—something like despair—when a customer snaps at her for a mistake on one of the fifty drinks she’s already made that morning. If we noticed the customer too. The bags under his eyes. The way his voice shifts up a register when he says the word “wrong”—often a sign of early activation, something old moving through him that has nothing to do with coffee. If we recognized that the little avatars stacked on our screens, saying things mundane and nonsensical and heartbreaking, are people. Just like us.
We would break.
NO.
That lie has insulated us from our own aliveness long enough.
We would OPEN. We would spill out into the world and the world would spill into us. We might feel like we were drowning or being consumed. Like a dam breaking open, unsure of when the flooding will stop; or maybe it scorches our throat from the sound that comes out feeling like breathing fire. The light entering would sting the way it stings when you’ve been in the dark for a decade or longer.
And then we would see.
I.
Empathy recruits more of the brain than any other cognitive function. It activates the mirror system, the mentalizing network, the interoceptive system, the limbic system, the somatosensory cortex—simultaneously. The biological investment is immense. Connection is an operation our nature deemed essential enough to divert resources from everything else. And when empathy fails, the failure is metabolic before it is moral. The conditions that exhaust us—the economy, the pace, the volume, the precarity—erode our highest-cost capacity first. The most human thing about us is the first thing to go when energetic resources are scarce.
The cost is still paid.
Every refusal to witness, every face we don’t see, every feeling we override—that energy remains and surfaces as what we call mental illness. Disease. Externalities. War. Loneliness. Abuse. The invoice arrives. We just don’t recognize it because it arrives in a different language than the one we used to refuse it.
Make it personal. Because it is. Because one day you will find yourself—your tragedy, your desperation, your injustice—reduced to a talking point. A footnote. A piece of propaganda laundering political persuasion through legitimate suffering. And the people reading about you will feel shock, moral outrage, and also do nothing. They will use your story to destroy other flattened people in the name of ideology, while the relief you needed never arrives.
Enough.
II.
I will draw the line now, in the open: my words come from me. They are for me. And they are not me. What you do with them—how they land, what they stir, whether they leave any trace at all—is entirely yours. I am asking for contact, not agreement.
If you’ve already labeled me—if you’ve already determined who I vote for, what team I’m on, where this argument is headed, the philosophical underpinning of a case I haven’t yet made—continuing to read will not serve you.
You have read, up to this point, words written by someone else. You cannot know what the remaining text holds. You cannot know what my mind or body hold except for what I reveal to you in these words. I am not a label, a category, an affiliation, a political movement, a class, a gender, an age, or a character in your narrative.
I am Anthony, who writes under the name Fire Tongue. These are my words. They are what I have to offer.
This piece is about what we are.
III.
Here is the question that sits underneath every crisis we witness:
We have the technology, the resources, and the capacity to address nearly every major condition we face. Environmental collapse. Corporate overreach. Addiction. Loneliness. Violence. The slow erosion of physical and cognitive health. The solutions exist. The resources exist. What is missing is the political will to act.
Why?
The answer has been available in many forms for longer than I’ve been alive, and certainly longer than anyone alive today has been here. Here’s one :
An object at rest stays at rest. An object in motion stays in motion. Unless acted upon by an external force.
Newton was describing physics. He was also describing us.
Force, in a human system, has a name. We call it emotion.
From the Latin emovere. To move out of. E—out. Movere—to move.
Emotion is movement. The felt experience of being moved—by contact with another person, with a condition, with something outside ourselves that the body registers as real. We take in. We allow ourselves to be touched. The nervous system generates a charge. The charge produces motion.
Remove the contact, and you remove the charge. Remove the charge, and the object stays at rest.
This is what the system does.
IV.
Every abstraction is a removal of contact.
“Two hundred and forty-five casualties.” Read that. Notice what happens in your body.
Now notice this: I could give you a name here. A city. A specific mother. The number of children waiting for her at home. The angle of the bullet. The window it came through. And your nervous system would mobilize—because I gave it a body instead of a count.
I’m choosing not to. Because using her death to prove my point is the operation I’m asking you to recognize.
But feel what just happened. You were reaching. Your mind was already constructing her—a face, an age, a kitchen, a child’s voice calling from another room. The nervous system began assembling a person from fragments because that is what it does. It mobilizes for bodies. Faces. Voices. Specific, irreducible people in specific, irreducible situations. The social bonding system activates when it detects another living being in proximity. Empathy is a physiological event, and it requires a person on the other end.
A person. Not a category.
“Casualties” is a category. “The homeless” is a category. “Illegals” is a category. “Human capital” is a category. Each one removes the face. Each one replaces contact with count. And each one leaves the nervous system with nothing to mobilize for. The information arrives. The charge does not. The object stays at rest.
This is what abstraction does. And I want to be clear here, because the problem is not abstraction itself.
Every architectural blueprint marks its scale—something like 1”= 20’. The blueprint compresses an actual house from a three-dimensional object into lines on a two-dimensional sheet of paper. It has to. A drawing at full scale would be fifty feet wide. It would be wasteful, unreadable, impossible to carry to the job site. The compression works. It allows us to plan, coordinate, innovate in ways that might never be achieved working only in material space.
Abstraction serves us the same way. Epidemiology needs aggregates. Public health needs trends. Policy needs patterns visible only at scale. The compression is real and useful—when we remember it is a compression.
The blueprint works because no one tries to live in it.
What I see right now is a world that has moved into the blueprint and forgotten the house. A world that measures entire countries—billions of irreducible lives—as single metrics flattened to look nothing close to human. GDP. Birth rate. Workforce participation. National security risk. The compression happened. The scale was never marked. And somewhere between the data and the decision, the people disappeared.
The abstraction edits the person out of the signal before the signal reaches you. By the time the word “casualties” arrives in your visual cortex, there is no body to mobilize for. The erasure already happened—upstream, in the language, before you had the chance to feel anything at all.
This is what abstraction does when it forgets what it compressed. And the system that produces the conditions we want changed is the same system that produces the language environment in which we cannot feel those conditions strongly enough to act.
V.
If you feel impatient right now—if you want me to skip to the solution—I understand. Notice the impatience.
That impulse is a completion-seeking behavior. The body senses unresolved tension and wants it discharged. Quickly. Cleanly. Give me the answer, give me the action step, give me the thing I can do and move on.
The extraction economy has learned to monetize that impulse. The scroll to the next headline is the prediction engine in seeking mode. The reduction of everything to “for or against” is the compression that prevents you from holding the structure long enough to locate the actual intervention point. The demand for a quick fix is the mechanism that ensures no fix arrives.
Sit with it. The discomfort is information.
Here is what the discomfort is telling you: your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It detected unresolved tension. It mobilized energy to resolve it. And now it is scanning for a discharge pathway—fight, fix, flee, scroll.
Every one of those pathways leads back to rest without resolution. The tension was never completed. It was only discharged. The cycle stays open. The energy dissipates. And tomorrow the same tension returns, because nothing in the underlying structure has changed.
The system runs on your incomplete cycles. Every open loop is a market. Every unresolved need is a customer. Every feeling that almost completes but doesn’t is a click, a purchase, a vote, a prescription, a scroll.
VI.
You are probably reading this on a phone.
That phone contains a platform that has converted you into a number. Every dimension of your relational existence—who you are to other people, how you connect, what you offer, what you receive—compressed into metrics. Follower count. Like count. View count. Engagement rate. The question shifts from “who am I?” to “where do I rank?”
The platform does not need to show harmful content. The encoding scheme is the harm. A person reduced to a metric is a person with the contact removed. A follower count is a category where a face used to be. And the nervous system, receiving numerical position instead of relational contact, generates no charge.
There is no number at which you are finished.
Read that again.
There is no number at which you are finished.
The platform has no completion signal. There is no metric that resolves the seeking.
This is the extraction economy’s operating principle made visible in your hand. The same mechanism that keeps the data center humming, the war escalating, the child support payment intercepted, the school defunded. Open loops. Incomplete cycles. Energy mobilized and never discharged into resolution. A population in permanent seeking mode, generating motion that never arrives anywhere.
And the children.
Adolescence is the developmental window when the brain is under active construction. Synaptic pruning is strengthening the pathways that get used and eliminating the ones that don’t. The limbic system—emotional reward processing—is mature. The prefrontal cortex—judgment, impulse regulation, long-term planning—is still being built. The architecture is open. Whatever environment the adolescent inhabits during this window gets wired in.
The environment they inhabit is a platform that encodes them as numbers. The neural pathways being pruned and strengthened are the pathways the platform activates: numerical comparison, status evaluation, social positioning. Metric-based self-assessment gets wired into the developing architecture during the window when identity itself is being constructed.
Meta’s own internal research—conducted between 2018 and 2020, leaked in 2021—documented that among teen girls who already struggled with body image, 32% said Instagram made it worse. That 13.5% of teen girls in the UK traced suicidal ideation to Instagram. That 17% reported aggravated eating disorders. Meta conducted this research. Documented the findings. And continued refining the engagement features that produced them.
Because the engagement features are the revenue mechanism. And the revenue mechanism requires that the completion signal never arrive. A finished user is a lost user. A satisfied person has no reason to scroll.
VII.
In biology, there is a term for what happens when a cell touches its neighbor and receives the signal to stop growing. It’s called contact inhibition. The cell makes contact. It registers the boundary. Growth stops. The organism maintains its form.
Cancer is what happens when that signal is lost.
The cell keeps growing past the boundary. It does not register the neighbor. It does not receive the signal. It consumes without limit because the mechanism that says “enough” has been disabled.
The extraction economy is contact inhibition failure at the social scale. The signal that says “enough”—the felt recognition of another person’s boundary, another community’s need, another species’ right to exist—has been removed from the system. The abstraction machine strips the contact. The metrics replace the faces. The growth continues without limit because nothing in the architecture generates the signal to stop.
And the treatment is the same in both cases. You do not cure cancer by arguing with the tumor. You locate where the contact inhibition signal was lost. You restore it.
VIII.
Make it personal.
That is the intervention. The whole intervention. Everything else follows from it.
When you read a statistic, find the person inside it. When you encounter a label, look for the face it replaced. When you feel the impulse to scroll past, notice that the impulse itself is the system working as designed—removing your contact with the thing that would move you.
Emotion is the force. Contact is what generates it. Abstraction is what prevents it. The system stays at rest because the conditions for motion have been stripped from the environment in which we try to think, feel, and respond.
The way out is local. It is specific. It is body-level.
A parent reads a school board policy and discovers it protects the institution, not the child. They shows up at the meeting. They names the specific mechanism. The cycle that was interrupted—the duty of care—begins to close.
A resident traces a data center’s water consumption to the aquifer that feeds the county. He maps the extraction. He brings the map to the zoning board. The cycle that was interrupted—the community’s relationship to its own resources—begins to close.
A researcher documents that a platform encodes children as numbers during the developmental window when their identity is under construction. She names the encoding scheme as the defect. The cycle that was interrupted—the child’s capacity to know themselves through relationship rather than rank—begins to close.
Each of these is someone who made it personal. Who restored contact with a specific condition that the abstraction machine had filed as someone else’s problem. Who allowed the charge to generate. Who moved.
The system that produces suffering at scale depends on your emotional immobility. It depends on the distance between you and the face inside the statistic. It depends on the number staying a number.
The force that changes it is the oldest force we have. Older than language. Older than number. Older than every system that learned to extract from us by removing us from each other.
Contact.
Allow yourself to be touched by the world. The rest follows.
𝔽🔥
Great article. Love the message. If we want to get rid of evil in the world we need to sacrifice things like complacency and ultimate tolerance (Because tolerance of everything leads to acceptance of everything which makes everything invalid. If we give making to every idea we have successfully blocked the signal for noise). Isolate the trump supporters or combat them directly until they see reason or realize nobody will put up with their shit at least... If we tolerate intolerance it will only breed hate and anger in the world!