Around 7 every morning, millions of people around the world wake up and suddenly discover that they all have the same opinion. They hate the same celebrity, love the same movie, and become furious about the same issue they had never heard of yesterday.

Wonderful. We have finally achieved the mind powers our ancestors always dreamed of. The only difference is that it is apparently summoned by an algorithm.

There are people who will never watch a movie before watching 10 videos explaining why it is good or bad. They will not try a new food until TikTok gives them permission. They do not know whether they like jazz until a man wearing glasses on YouTube informs them that jazz is for intelligent people.

They do not form opinions. They download them.

I really enjoy sitting in cafes just to watch people. A few sit looking at the trees outside the window. A very few write, while the last known sightings of people actually reading books are becoming increasingly rare. But there are also people who spend two hours with headphones clamped firmly around their ears, watching someone explain that sitting in a cafe will make them more creative.

They consume content about being creative instead of actually creating anything. They watch videos about meditation for longer than they meditate. They listen to health podcasts for longer than they walk. They read books about happiness while getting angry at a Grab driver for being three minutes late.

A group of people using smartphones to photograph an outdoor scene. Photo by Rumeysa Demir via Pexels

I used to think this was a problem with the Internet. Then I realized it was worse than that. The real problem is that we are having less and less contact with real life.

There are people who know all the drama happening online but do not know the name of the security guard in their own apartment building. They can tell you, in impressive detail, the political situation in three different countries, but have never spoken to the woman selling coffee at the end of their street, all while their critical thinking sits cold and abandoned in some forgotten glacial citadel.

These days, the algorithm has become a strangely kind mother. It tells us what to wear, one foot in our underwear at a time. It tells us what to eat, who to like, who to hate and how to feel every morning.

I suspect that if some celebrity posts a video tomorrow saying that sitting around watching clouds increases your IQ, the whole country will be dragging chairs onto their balconies and calling it a minimalist Nordic lifestyle. The clouds, meanwhile, would have no idea they were contributing to human intelligence.

The cure for this disease may sound a little frightening. Turn off the Wi-Fi for a day. Go outside. Sit in a park. Look at a tree. Talk to a stranger. If, 10 minutes later, you find yourself reaching for your phone to see what everyone else thinks about that tree, I'm afraid your mind is a wasteland beyond salvage.

Perhaps that tree has more thoughts of its own than you do. Which, to be fair, is asking quite a lot of a tree.