This Is the Game. Let’s Play It Better.

The scroll has flattened us all into one feed. It’s time to decide what we want to build from here.

In 2005, Thomas Friedman published The World Is Flat. He was writing about globalization, technology, and how the boundaries between nations, companies, and people were dissolving. Two decades later, we are living a different kind of flattening. It isn’t about supply chains or offshoring.

It’s about our attention.

Every day, billions of us wake up and enter the same arena: the scroll. It doesn’t matter if you’re twenty-two or eighty-two, an executive or a student, a retiree or a freelancer. The scroll doesn’t care. It collapses every age, every life stage, every content norm into one endless feed.

I recently saw a Gen Z woman from the UK posts her “Lock In” morning routine on LinkedIn. The video was extensive, showing quick cuts of her oil pulling, working out, eating breakfast, and meditating. The comments below her video included: “When did LinkedIn become TikTok?”

A perfect snapshot of the friction.

For some, this kind of content is inspiring. For others, it feels like an invasion. What it really shows us is how the boundaries we once relied on—between work and play, private and public, stages of life—no longer exist online.

This is the game. The scroll is flat.

Going backwards isn’t an option. There won’t be a day when LinkedIn “returns” to being only resumes and industry reports, or when Instagram isn’t also a marketplace. On TikTok, Y2K fashion—once dismissed—is reborn through “how we dressed in high school” hauls, where moms pull old clothes from their closets and daughters try them on for the camera. What was passé is now aspirational, flattening time as much as age.

The platforms will keep evolving. The only question left is how we show up inside them.

We can waste energy wishing it were otherwise, or we can decide: What do we want to build here?

For me, the answer is clarity, creativity, and connection. That’s the work I’ve been doing for years, and it’s the heart of my new book, It’s Not You, It’s the Algorithm. The scroll isn’t evil. It isn’t going away. But it is shaping us in ways we barely notice, and that deserves our attention.

If the world is flat and the scroll is flat, then the challenge of our time is to play the game better. To make new choices. To build spaces, experiences, and stories that actually matter.

Some people will stay on autopilot. Others will use the same feed to connect across ages and across time—moms and daughters, coworkers of different generations, strangers finding common ground in unexpected places.

For those of us ready to think differently about the way we live, lead, and create, this is our moment.

Let’s play it better.