At first, it all felt like progress. Smooth interfaces. Same-day shipping. Affordable college loans. Doctors who smiled. Governments that promised. Food that tasted like it came from the earth rather than a lab.
There was a time, not so long ago, when life seemed to be pointing somewhere promising, if not quite paradise then at least competence. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, everything began to sour. What was once reliable began to glitch. What was once generous began to nickel-and-dime. What was once built for humans became optimized for “engagement.”
We learned a new word in 2022 for what was happening around us: enshittification.
The term was coined for tech platforms, but it bled quickly into everything else. At its heart, enshittification is a bait-and-switch operation. It begins with abundance, a wooing of the user. Then comes the squeeze. Costs creep. Quality slips. The thing that once worked beautifully now asks for a subscription. The doctor who used to know your name now stares at a screen while you try to explain the pain in your chest. The food still looks the same but somehow tastes like an approximation of food. Your child’s education is run by metrics. Your vote feels symbolic. Your job is “streamlined.” Your friendships are filtered through advertisements. Your joys are monetized.
It would be comforting to imagine this is all accidental. That there is a benign chaos guiding the deterioration. But it’s not chaos. It’s extraction. Every institution, every platform, every once-helpful tool has become a funnel pointed upward, siphoning time, attention, and money toward fewer and fewer people. That might sound conspiratorial until you realize it doesn’t require conspiracy. It only requires indifference. Apathy wears a necktie now. It holds meetings. It sets prices. It edits terms of service.
What’s most insidious is that enshittification doesn’t feel like a disaster. It feels like a thousand little annoyances you learn to tolerate. It feels like being asked to prove your humanity to a website. It feels like paying extra to not be harassed. It feels like accepting that no one answers the phone anymore. It feels like the toothpaste tube shrinking while the price rises.
You don’t notice it all at once. You notice it in glimpses. A vending machine that won’t take cash. A school that disciplines children for being hungry. A government agency that redirects you to another agency that no longer exists. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a dull suspicion arises: maybe this isn’t just decay. Maybe this is the new design.
People sometimes wonder why cynicism spreads like mold these days. But it’s not cynicism. It’s pattern recognition. And once you begin to see the pattern, it’s hard to unsee. Not just in your phone or your job but in nearly every domain of life. The long decline is no longer confined to tech companies. It has become ambient. Healthcare no longer heals. Education no longer educates. Governance no longer governs. They all perform the gestures but have lost the spirit. They’ve become husks, like buildings with their facades still intact while the interiors rot.
And yet, despite everything, people keep showing up. They bring meals to neighbors. They organize libraries of tools and books. They teach their children what the curriculum forgot. They grow tomatoes in vacant lots. They walk elderly dogs. They keep talking to one another even after the algorithm tries to divide them. Because even if the world is enshittifying, not everyone is.
The machinery of decay is real, and it is well-funded, but it’s also clumsy. It has no poetry. It has no warmth. It doesn’t know how to love, or to sacrifice, or to laugh at itself. All of that still belongs to us. The ones who hold the door open. The ones who say good morning. The ones who fix bicycles and bake bread and share passwords and pick up trash and write essays no one paid them to write. We haven’t forgotten how to care. We’ve just forgotten how powerful that still is.
So no, there may be no revolution on the horizon. No grand reversal. No hero at the gates. But there is this: the refusal to participate fully in the decline. The quiet insistence that life can be better than optimized. That value isn’t the same thing as price. That convenience is not the same thing as care. That the soul still whispers, even if everything else screams.
And maybe that’s the only real resistance left. Not rage. Not retreat. Just the calm, daily refusal to become less human in a world that keeps asking us to.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.