Your Phone Knows You Better Than Your Friends Do
Why perfect relevance might be the loneliest thing on your phone
My phone knows I like ancient history, conspiracy theories, coffee content, and clips of vintage cars looking incredible. It serves me exactly what I want, exactly when I want it. It’s perfect.
My best mate doesn’t know any of that. He’d probably guess golf and beers.. and to be honest.. he’d be partly right too.
So here’s the weird thing.. the algorithm knows my ‘preferences’ better than the people closest to me. But my best mate knows me. There’s a difference, and it took me a while to see it.
Knowing what content I’ll engage with isn’t the same as knowing who I am (at least I hope not).. The algorithm can predict what I’ll click, but it has no idea what I’m going through. It doesn’t know I’ve been a bit quiet lately. It doesn’t check in. It just serves more content.. keeping me (the hamster) going around the wheel.
My mate once rang me out of nowhere because I’d been quiet in the group chat for a few days. No reason. No agenda. Just.. “you alright?” That’s understanding. That’s someone noticing a gap and filling it with effort, not content.
The algorithm noticed I’d been quiet too.. though it just showed me more reels.
I think we’ve started confusing curation with connection. The feed feels personal because it’s tailored. But it’s not personal at all. It’s a multibillion pound machine doing maths, showing you things that keep your thumb swiping up.
And the mad thing is.. we let it. We open the app knowing exactly what’s going to happen. We’ll scroll for twenty minutes, see nothing that matters, close it, and then open it again eleven minutes later - just because.. It’s not connection. It’s not even entertainment half the time. It’s just a habit.. shaped by something smarter than us.
I caught myself the other day picking up my phone after a meeting at work for absolutely no reason. Not a notification. Not a message. Just my hand reached for it like some sort of reflex post meeting. I unlocked it, stared at the home screen for a second, opened Instagram, scrolled for about fifteen minutes, closed the app, and then remembered I’d originally picked the phone up to reply to a message I got during the meeting.
Fifteen minutes. Gone. On nothing. And the worst part isn’t the time, it’s that I didn’t even decide to do it. My thumb just knew where to go.
I’ve started trying not to scroll first thing in the morning or last thing at night. And I’ll be honest, it’s harder than it should be.. That’s probably the bit that bothers me most. Not that the algorithm is clever, but that it’s trained me so well I have to actively resist it. I have to make a conscious effort to not do something I never consciously chose to start doing in the first place. tip for you - leave your phone on charge outside your bedroom!
When you start noticing this stuff it’s hard to stop. You see it everywhere. You notice when you close an app and reopen it immediately.. not because anything’s changed but because your brain just wants another hit. You notice when a conversation reminds you of a reel you watched instead of something you actually experienced. You notice that your opinions on things you’ve never really thought about are weirdly strong, and you can’t quite remember where they came from..
That’s the bit that gets me. The algorithm doesn’t just take your time. It fills in the gaps where your own thoughts used to be.
Your best friend might send you a terrible meme at the wrong time about something you’re not even into.. for me it’s usually a post with cats or one of those ‘your birthday month is X’ things.. But there’s something in that randomness.. that imperfection.. that feels more human than any algorithm ever could.
Perfect relevance is actually kind of lonely. Because nobody chose it for you. Nobody thought of you. A system just calculated what would keep your attention the longest.
I’d rather get a bad recommendation from someone who actually gives a damn.. unless it’s cats. Please stop the cat posts.
Maybe what we actually need isn’t a smarter feed. Maybe it’s a smaller one.. with real people in it.