Don't Become A Simulacrum Of A Person

Spend enough time watching other people perform their lives and you begin, without deciding to, to perform a version of it back. The wants arrive pre-installed. The taste is downloaded. The self becomes a compression of a thousand feeds.

This is not a moral failing. It is a physics of attention: you become like what you behold. The danger is not that you consume — it is that you consume without noticing, until the borrowed desires feel like your own.

The antidote is not to withdraw from culture. It is to choose your inputs the way you would choose your food — deliberately, and with some idea of what they are turning you into.