when everything becomes slop
remember that you are a T-Rex
As you set out for Ithaca
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Constantine P. Cavafy, Poet, Ithaca (1911)
“T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed. He wants to hunt.”
Dr. Alan Grant, paleontologist, Jurassic Park (1993)
If you are a human reading this, then I bet you are a T-Rex.
Not the carnivorous type. More like the intellectual one.
Humans love hunting for meaning. It’s why we exist.
Sometimes we catch it, often we don’t. What matters is the chase.
The struggle, the quest for discovery, the hot pursuit. We love that.
It’s the journey that makes it all worthwhile.
Stories don’t start by spitting out the ending. Students don’t learn algebra by looking at the solution. Knowledge does not arrive without the act of (often slow, often difficult) learning.
Effort creates meaning.
Lately, that meaning is harder to find. You feel it too, right?
The numbness. The boredom. That strange emptiness.
It’s everywhere.
The TikTok you just scrolled? It looks a lot like the last one.
The search you just did on Google? It feels broken.
That article you just read? The words seem legitimate. But it makes no sense.
Your Linkedin? Everyone is now an influencer writing like Tolstoy.
Your X timeline? Thread after thread full of emojis and carefully spaced platitudes.
Our digital world has transformed. It is unrecognizable.
Suddenly everyone is a genius. Full of insights. Frameworks. Deep thinking. With ten lessons that changed their life. Reaching $100M revenue in 5 minutes. Sharing pictures drinking coffee with their celebrity crushes.
What’s real? What’s fake? Hard to tell any more.
It’s all the same.
Everything is slop.
Over the past few years, online content has exploded. Newsletters, threads, posts, explainers, articles, videos. An endless flood, produced faster than any human could possibly digest, turbocharged by AI.
I bet you cannot even remember the last thing you clicked before reading this article.
The internet is louder yet emptier than ever. Flatter. Smoother. Less diverse.
Everyone feeds into the same algorithms and feeds off them too.
It feels dull. Boring. Unsurprising.
And yet, you can’t help it. You want more.
You scroll because you are hungry.
But the meaning is just not there.
So you scroll again.
More. More. More.
And the more you can’t find it, the more you scroll.
Your missing piece is growing with each new one that doesn’t fit the spot.
Welcome to the age of the Dead Internet.
The age when everyone has so much to say, and yet says absolutely nothing.
When all content is algorithmically optimized and nothing feels alive.
When there are more bots than actual humans talking to each other.
When everything converges to the same artificial language and robotic style.
When your mind is constantly fed but your spirit feels hungrier than ever.
It’s not just the large tech platforms that have embraced the sludge. We all have. We consume it. We produce it.
It’s cheap. It’s easy. And “it works.”
Slop is everything.
And it’s not slowing down.
It’s more visceral than spam. It is pervasive. You cannot escape it.
New content trained on yesterday’s content. AI trained on AI trained on AI. Slop eating slop, and producing more slop, ad infinitum.
Here’s the part that sucks: slop is here to stay.
But there is one thing we still control.
That is, what we let into our heads.
We can stop rewarding low-effort, highly repetitive sameness with our attention.
We can choose things that feel slower. Weirder. Riskier. Difficult. And more human.
We can reclaim our meaning by engaging more with the physical world. Conversations that last longer. Books that resist us. Ideas that don’t fit into a single thread.
Because we are not built to be fed.
We are built to hunt.
And if we let the algorithm spoon-feed us, we will not starve today.
But we will forget how to hunt tomorrow.
And that is how T-Rexes go extinct.
They don’t need an asteroid.
