My MacBook's cursor blinks at me like a judgmental auntie at a wedding: persistent, expectant, slightly disgusted by my inability to perform. I'm ghostwriting another thought leadership piece and my fingers hover over the keyboard like they're performing a séance with dead ideas.

"The key to scaling your startup is thinking differently about value creation."

Delete.

Type: "Value isn't created, it's discovered."

Delete.

"Discovery is the new creation."

Delete delete delete.

I know the right template is there, waiting in my muscle memory. But then I notice that I can't remember the last time I had a thought that wasn't essentially a remix of someone else's remix of someone else's screenshot of a tweet about a reel that was responding to a LinkedIn post. Even this observation about not having original thoughts feels borrowed, probably from that Substack essay everyone was sharing last month, or was it the month before? Time moves differently when every day is the same five conversations happening in slightly different formats. Also, is "substacked" is a verb now, like "tweeted" or "googled"?

The medium is the massage, McLuhan said, but what he didn't predict: the massage becoming a chokehold. The medium is eating the message, digesting it, excreting it as engagement bait. The thoughts arrive pre-formatted, complete with optimal character count for tweets.

I'm supposed to be writing for my B2B SaaS startup's LinkedIn presence, but every opening I draft feels like I've already read it a bazillion times this week, probably because I have. It's the same rotation of the same hooks that everyone pretends is fresh each time someone posts them.

I type: "The future of work is —"

Backspace. Delete.

Everyone and their emotional support ChatGPT has written about the future of work. I try again:

"Most people think productivity is about doing more, but actually —"

My fingers hover. This is James Clear. Or maybe Ankur Warikoo?

Maybe I should recycle from that VC's thread everyone quote-tweeted last week. The one about treating your life like a portfolio of investments.

I open Twitter to clear my head. Bad idea. Worse habit. I scroll for inspiration, which is like looking for nutrition at a mithai shop, or like trying to cure drowning by jumping into a different part of the ocean.

@RandomThoughtLeader has posted: "Your network is your net worth."

Revolutionary. Never heard that before.

Everyone's posting about the same founder who raised $50M for an app that lets you cheat in interviews.

"This is late-stage capitalism."

"no, this is genius."

"techbros need to touch grass."

"so dystopian."

I catch myself thinking "lowkey valid" and want to perform a lobotomy with my Apple Pencil.

Back to the doc.

"The most successful brands don't create desire, they create inevitability."

This is Hormozi. Everything is Hormozi now.

My stomach turns. I'm doing it again. These aren't my words. They're everybody's words, which means they're nobody's words. They're word-shaped holes we pour ourselves through. When I try to think of something genuinely new, there's just static. I'm trying to tune into a dead frequency. Even my sentence structure is plagiarized and I can feel my brain trying to autofill the rest from a template.

Last year, a viral idea would circulate for weeks before becoming unbearable. Now it takes a few days. Someone tweets about "founder mode" in the morning. By lunch, every founder has read PG's essay and is now in founder mode. By Day 3, founder mode is cringe. By Day 5, everyone has moved on to the next hot take. But honestly, nobody knows what "founder mode" actually means. Everyone uses it to signal they've read PG's latest essay and are ingroup.

The thing is, my content performs. It resonates. It drives engagement. But I've become fluent in a language that consists entirely of other people's thoughts.

My therapist calls for our session.

"I can't think original thoughts anymore," I tell her.

"Write without thinking," she says.

"But that's exactly the problem," I tell her. "I can't think while writing. The thinking happens before I think it. Pre-thought. Borrowed thought. It's like we are all just..."

"Human large language models?" she finishes. "Yeah, someone said that on X. Or was it Bluesky?"

The call ends. I open a new document. Blank. Pure potential. I'm going to write something original if it kills me. I'll write one completely original sentence. Just one. Something that's never been said or thought before. My fingers rest on the keys. But every combination of words I can imagine has been tweeted, posted, shared, liked, forgotten, recycled. Even my desire for originality feels unoriginal. How many writers right now are having this exact crisis, probably while scrolling through the same feeds, seeing the same posts, thinking the same thoughts about thinking the same thoughts?

And I freeze. Because every possible combination of words feels like a hook I've already read somewhere.

Period. Just a period. That's what discourse has become. A full stop pretending to be profound. Stream-of-consciousness writing the same consciousness because the stream dried up and we're all sipping from the same stagnant puddle.

My phone buzzes. Instagram notification. Paarul posted a sunset. Caption: "Grateful." The sunset looks exactly like the nine hundred sunsets in my feed. Same golden hour. Same reflection on water. I double-tap. What else can you do?

Back to the document. I'll try stream of consciousness. Just let it flow.

"Purple elephant spatula democracy..."

No. That's forced randomness.

I could use ChatGPT to write this; everyone does now, we just don't talk about it, like a collective secret that isn't secret. But when I tried last week, the output was, dare I say, better than my own writing, which should have been convenient but instead felt like staring into an abyss that was staring back, reminding me of my atrophying skills.

"What if we are not turning into NPCs. What if we've always been NPCs who briefly hallucinated we were players."

Delete. That can't go from the founder's account.

I try again: "Your customers aren't buying your product..."

"... they're buying permission to want what everyone else already wants."

Fuck. That's good. Too good. Which probably means it's not mine.

I Google the phrase. Nothing. I search Twitter. Nothing. For thirty seconds, I feel the rush of potential originality. Then I realize: if it's not online, did I even think it? If a thought falls in a forest and no one screenshots it for their story...

I stare at my screen. The cursor blinks.

I think: Why generate new thoughts when the old ones still convert? Maybe I should consciously choose the most NPC response to everything.

Hmm. Interesting thought.

I stand up. Walk around. Touch grass, as they say. As we all say.

Outside, I overhear a conversation betwee two girls.

"it's giving main character energy"

"man, she's cooked"

"for real bro"

"he's so cringe!"

Even social interactions today are full of slop. I may not know what combination of words I just heard, but I nod. We all nod. Nodding is safe. Original opinions are cheugy unless they're ironically unoriginal, which makes them originally unoriginal, which is just original, which is problematic because trying is cringe, but is also cool again, but is cringe when someone actually comes across as trying hard.

The medium has colonized our mouths. Every thought and feeling arrives with metadata attached: how it will play on twitter, what trending meme it connects to, which aesthetic it serves.

Back at home. Back to the doc. I give up, let the current carry me. The words flow now, frictionless. Every sentence a hit. The doc fills itself; I'm just the hardware running the software of collective thought.

Maybe we are not losing the ability to think new thoughts. We are only discovering there were never that many thoughts to begin with. Maybe a hundred, max. Everything else was just aesthetic variation on the same themes. The internet just revealed this scarcity.

The post is done. 857 words of pure, premium thought leadership. Indistinguishable from any blue check's newsletter.

Perfect. Ship it.

I'll post it tomorrow, watch it get like 2,847 impressions, 47 likes, 12 reshares. The metrics predetermined by the keywords I've unconsciously optimized for. Someone will comment "This is insightful, thanks for sharing" and mean nothing by it. Another thought leader will repost with a quote and get twice my reach.

I close my laptop, but the thoughts continue. What if consciousness isn't individual at all? What if we're all just different accounts logged into the same mind?

Delete.

Too unoriginal to post. Too original to think.

Outside my window, the sunset looks exactly like every sunset on Instagram. It's beautiful in the way everything is beautiful now: recognizable, shareable, forgettable. Someone somewhere is typing "Grateful."

So am I, I guess. Grateful for the movie-brain. Grateful for the convenience of being pre-chewed. Grateful that now, finally, I can stop trying. Grateful that I'll never have to think again.

My phone buzzes. Notification from LinkedIn. Some Kaushik has tagged me in his post.

"Might be a controversial take but execution beats ideas."

A thousand likes already. Banger. Kaushik doesn't realize this is the most popular opinion in the history of popular opinions. Kaushik's never had an unpopular opinion. Kaushik's never had his own opinion, period.

But I like it as a courtesy. You like when someone tags you. It's polite. Keeps the circle-jerk going. It's a secret handshake.

We are all in this for the engagement. We are all Kaushik now.

Kaushik wants to know my thoughts.

I want to know them too.