The World Has OCD Now

The algorithm is well understood and quite effective

I grew up with OCD.

Not the neat-desk kind.
The kind where your brain tells you something terrible will happen if you don’t do a thing.

When I was a kid, I honestly believed that if I didn’t do certain rituals, the Holocaust would happen again. I opened doors eleven times. I tapped. I checked. I crawled through crawl spaces at night. It didn’t make sense. It felt necessary.

From the inside, OCD doesn’t feel crazy.
It feels like being on watch.

You get a thought.
Something bad is coming.
You do a ritual.
You feel a little better.
Then the thought comes back louder.

That was my childhood.

What helped wasn’t thinking my way out of it. It was giving the energy somewhere else to go.

If I didn’t make something, I felt physically wrong. So I made things. Drawings. Paintings. Sculptures. Digital work. Collage. I like collage because you can jam unrelated things together and see what happens.

I did the same with everything else I cared about — sports, inventing, starting companies, organizing people, long nights building things with friends.

That’s what steadied me.
Not certainty.
Motion and connection.

I still have OCD. I probably always will. But it doesn’t run my life nearly as much as it used to.

When I was a young man in college, I started watching CNN. I would watch the same half-hour segment about the war in Iraq over and over. Not only was I bathing in weak journalism and propaganda, but it was also feeding my anxiety about the future in a way that didn’t help me or anyone else.

I didn’t know it then, but I was already rehearsing the loop.

Now I’m watching it everywhere.

Something violent happens.
A clip hits your feed.
Your body reacts.

You scroll.
You refresh.
You argue.
You share.

That’s the ritual.

These platforms don’t care what’s true. They care about what keeps you looking. Fear works. Anger works. Certainty works.

It’s the same loop I grew up with, just pointed at millions of people.

Underneath it are real lives. Let’s take what happened this week.

Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old mother, partner, community volunteer, and poet. She was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. People are in the streets because that matters. That part is real.

But watching every clip and living inside the panic doesn’t honor her. It just feeds the machine. And ultimately, that machine is there to tribalize you and sell you stuff, not to deliver cooperation and justice on earth. Because, like I explained in the chart above, it’s basically just OCD at scale.

Yes, the world is dangerous. Paying attention matters. But living in a constant state of emergency doesn’t make you smarter or safer. It just wears you down.

I still fall into it sometimes. Old wiring is old wiring. But after my heart attack, I had to admit something: this level of worry wasn’t helping me or anyone I knew.

Fear by itself doesn’t do anything useful.
Fear turned into action.

Art.
Sports.
Building things.

Organizing for change.
Being with people.

That’s how you break the loop.

The big internet companies want you staring at the fire.
Go make something instead.