There’s a thing I do in coffee chats now. I don’t talk about what I saw on my phone.

Not because it’s private. Because it does not exist on their timeline/feed or fyp, whatever you call it.

I have sat across from someone and not understood what they were talking about, then realized the reverse is also true. If I brought up what I scrolled before bed, I would be the only person at the table who had seen it.

It feels like a highway. Everyone has a destination. I do not reach theirs. They do not reach mine.

Mine is tech, AI, startups, agents, the next thing to build. A friend on the other side of the table is in politics, in how this country is actually going. That does not show up for me. I do not show up for them.

There's another version of this with friends who are climbing a career ladder. Their path is a bigger company, a better title, the next rung. My timeline does not speak that way. It speaks like: start a business. Read this book. Build something. I don't even see myself climbing that ladder. For a while that felt like I had figured something out.

I had not. The algorithm leaned me toward building my own thing. Theirs leaned them toward a career. I do not have enough information to call their path wrong. I barely have enough to call mine right. I just have a different feed.

It is not only news. It is taste.

I noticed this at my startup, Kugie. I was building a dashboard. In my head a good list is a list. Minimal. Keyboard shortcuts. Quiet. That is Linear. I use Linear all the time, so of course that is what "good" looks like. I shipped it that way.

It was too minimal for the person who had to use it. They wanted cards, a board, more to click. What I thought was a better experience was just the one my tools had been training into me.

Same bubble, different surface. The feed decides what I think is true. The tools decide what I think is beautiful.

Shared grounding is getting rare

I keep thinking about how small the old stack of information was. A paper magazine. A newspaper. One object a lot of people could point at. Now everyone has their own magazine, rebuilt every night when they scroll, and AI is generating more of it than any of us can read. Shared grounding is getting rare. Deciding who is right is getting bizarre. Your brain is being trained in bed, before sleep, by a ranking function that does not know the person you will sit with tomorrow.

So this is not the era where I get to claim I know. Or that I have taste. Or that a career is a trap because my timeline never shows one.

I don't have a tidy lesson to end on. I just trust the table more than the feed. You sit down, you bring a topic, they bring a different one, and for a minute you are not on the highway. That is the only place I have found that can restart how I think.