A Fire, a Starry Night, and the Thing We’re Missing
What real presence teaches us that the digital world cannot
Yesterday I found myself pulled into a podcast episode about how men are signaling their attractiveness online. Posing with weights, posing with tote bags, posing with Labubu dolls (yes, apparently this is a thing some men are using to position themselves as suitable partners — or at least a weekend away in the Poconos). Twenty minutes passed with over an hour remaining and I still couldn’t tell where the conversation was going.
I kept thinking:
What’s the point here?
Who cares?
And is there a way we can collectively crawl out of this swamp?
But the deeper truth wasn’t in the superficial conversation. The tension around not having an answer bubbled beneath their jokes and the fatigue in their voices. That tension is one of the big themes I explore in my book:
No one asked for dating or relationships or being human for that matter to turn into this.
No one asked for connection to become a form of content.
No one asked to replace curiosity with categories to analyze to death in a mad attempt at gaining a sliver of understanding about who’s out there and could they make a decent partner?
We’ve made so much progress in how we relate to one another — more freedom, more choice, more room to be who we are — yet the online world somehow collapsed all of that into a new set of unspoken rules none of us remember agreeing to.
Different cage. New script. Same sense that something essential has been stolen. And so many are now searching for it without a flashlight.
The Night I Remembered What Connection Actually Feels Like
The last time I went camping, it was early January. I was with my boyfriend at the time, camping in the same special spot in the Catskills like the other times we’d camped. It was my first time winter camping and I was excited. Snow on the ground. Trees, bare and solitary. Natural elements, more pronounced.
After hauling our stuff from the truck to the spot, I gathered kindling in the last bit of twilight. He built a fire. The stars came out overhead. The woods were breathing around us.
There was a moment after we sat down to warm our feet and hands — I remember it precisely — when I felt complete peace.
No tension. No anxiety. No performance. My jaw was loose. I felt myself floating with the sparks crackling off the fire.
That moment had no category or signal or metadata. There was no pressure to perform. I deliberately did not take any photos, keeping my phone tucked away in the tent.
It was pure nuance, the kind that can’t be posted, measured, or optimized.
And I knew: This is what we’re starving for.
Not more archetypes. Not more content. Not more rules about what a man’s tote bag or doll collection allegedly means.
We’re starving for that feeling:
The uncompressed human moment when everything is right with the world.
The Internet Has Flattened Us Into 1s and 0s
Contrast that with a group call I was on recently.
Someone prefaced their comment with:
“You might not like this, MaryLou, but I’m building a bot in ChatGPT that’s saving me 22 hours a week.”
Instantly, I felt a hit of misunderstanding — a tiny sting. I’m all for people using tools like ChatGPT and was actually quite impressed he’s learning how to save time on menial tasks with AI. What hit me was the assumption his comment made, a perception of me had calcified somewhere:
She’s anti-AI.
It’s ironic, really. My book and entire INYITA universe is about using AI more intelligently, more consciously, more aligned — not rejecting it.
But this is exactly what the algorithm era does:
It compresses people into categories they didn’t sign up for but woke up one day to discover it’s been tattooed on their forehead.
“Toxic male”
“Needy”
“Unsafe”
“Narcissist”
“Attention seeking”
“Irrelevant”
I could go on but why.
These labels flatten nuance into shorthand. They trade the real person for the easiest label.
Even my book title — It’s Not You, It’s the Algorithm (INYITA) — lands as a binary statement in a world that’s already drowning in binaries.
So we end up misreading each other. Performing for each other even when we don’t want to. Signaling some message about who we are, what matters, what any of this means instead of sensing.
The Real Loss Isn’t Romance, It’s Nuance
When the internet turned dating (and relationships in general) into a visual résumé, it also stripped away the thing that makes connection magical:
the space between two people when neither is performing.
Nuance.
Subtlety.
Ambiguity.
Curiosity.
The slow revelation of self.
Words AI is eroding at scale.
The ancient dance of “Who are you? Who might we be together?” has been replaced with:
Swipe left.
Swipe right.
Green flag.
Red flag.
Would date.
Would never.
Gym photo = protector.
Tote bag = cultured.
Doll = ???
We’re no longer meeting each other. We’re decoding each other. Judging before the screen has a chance to catch up to the judgment.
And in the process, we’ve stopped trusting our own interior worlds, the parts of us that sense, intuit, soften, open, discern, and wonder.
Forget Behavior. Nuance Is a Nervous System State.
This is the part missing from nearly every conversation about modern dating (and again, relationships in general).
You don’t restore nuance by going analog. People will turn that into performance too.
Nuance returns when your inner world is reclaimed from urgency, comparison, and algorithmic hypervigilance.
For me, nuance emerges when I feel:
Calm.
Empty but not hungry.
Peaceful.
Clear headed.
Soft.
Strong.
Grateful.
Aligned.
In that state, a man with a Labubu doll stops being a category — he becomes a story.
In that state, someone’s AI enthusiasm doesn’t feel like a threat — it becomes a curiosity.
In that state, the world stops flattening you. You stop flattening others. And connection becomes possible again.
The INYITA Question
The internet will continue to compress the world into 1s and 0s. That’s its nature.
But I’m not a binary system and neither are you.
You’re a nuanced organism with an entire emotional and perceptive bandwidth the algorithm can’t touch.
So the real question is:
How do we rebuild the internal capacity for nuance in a world that profits from erasing it?
This is where I’m taking the INYITA universe next. Not toward anti-tech fear or nostalgia for a world that no longer exists because that’s not practical. I’m focused on leading toward a new kind of sovereignty:
Where connection becomes human again. Where signaling gives way to sensing. Where inner stillness becomes the loudest form of clarity. Where nuance returns as a form of power.
The algorithm can flatten behavior, but it cannot touch the part of you that knows how to feel the fire, sit in the quiet, and experience peace in the presence of another human being.
That part is still there. Waiting.
And that’s where everything begins.
If you’re ready to take a single step back toward nuance, try this:
Before reacting to or labeling or even dismissing something online — a post, a comment, a profile, a headline — ask yourself one quiet question:
“What else might be true here?”
Not to find the answer. Just to widen your field.
That widening is the beginning of your agency. It’s also the beginning of your humanity coming back from your true center.