I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why the internet isn’t fun anymore. And one of the hypotheses I’ve come to believe is that we moved, at some point, from this period where the internet was about curation, it was about finding these individuals who would welcome you into these worlds they had created and found and put together for you, to this internet of algorithms. And one of the quiet things that happened when that happened is that it became harder to feel like you were finding individual experiences on the internet, and it became harder to be an individual on the internet. And because we live a lot of our lives on the internet, that means it also became harder to be an individual. And as this yearning for this digital life that I feel like I once had, and no longer do, has grown, I’ve noticed myself in my own life seeking out people who are individuals and people, more than that, who seem to have their own sense of aesthetics of style, of taste. These weren’t things that were that important to me a decade ago. But they’ve become more important to me now. I’ve come to see them almost as a kind of superpower, both because just living a beautiful life or living a life in which beauty has a central role feels more important to me as I get older, but also because it feels increasingly like a kind of superpower, like a kind of act of resistance against what these algorithms and what this age online is doing to us. It feels like being able to be attuned enough inside yourself to know what you really like, not just what you’re being fed, being attentive enough to the world around you to see things that are really yours, not just everybody else’s — it feels like an important way to live.