Our Lives Are “an Orchestrated Shuffle of Technology”
The article discusses how technology has consumed people's lives, making them unable to recall their past experiences or achieve their goals. It highlights the impact of constant screen time on individuals, particularly as they age. The piece also touches on the idea that people's lives are often compared to others' through social media, leading to a sense of inadequacy and disconnection from reality.
- ▪Many people spend a significant amount of time staring at screens, with some spending up to 7 hours a day.
- ▪This excessive screen time can lead to a sense of disconnection from reality and an inability to recall past experiences.
- ▪The article suggests that people's lives are often curated and compared to others' through social media, contributing to feelings of inadequacy.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | kottke.org |
| Canonical URL | https://kottke.org/26/07/our-lives-are-an-orchestrated-shuffle-of-technology |
| Publication time | 2026-07-06T18:45:00Z |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-06T18:52:54.586Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-06T18:52:54.586Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | oYFp5cW6lwYD |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
But wait. You are 70 years old. You’re sitting in your home. Your grandchildren ask you what your 20s were like, and you honestly can’t tell them. You have no heirlooms; Temu doesn’t last. You never moved to Paris or quit the toxic job or booked the Spanish lesson. You were too nervous to get that tattoo, never went back to school. You were too awkward to go to the nude drawing class, you never did learn how to make dumplings. Your feed was so full of people living lives so full you never stopped to consider yours.The great love affair of your life is… this. Sitting in the dark, your nose 6 inches from the screen. You have never separated, never taken a break. It started slowly, rockily. But by 25, it had its claws in you. By 30, it fills the dead spaces in your life.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at kottke.org.
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