That cute California Sea Lion was photographed by me. A few months ago, I bought a camera. When I was sawing reviews online, at least four of them recommended the model I brought. One curious fact were two repeated phrases, saying in different ways, but the same message. The first was that its photo formats were very convenient for uploading to Instagram. The second was that the camera had all the features a modern content creator could need.

But why should the purpose of buying a camera be defined by social media posting?

Fortunately, I have my brother and a few other nerdy friends who helped me choose the right camera for me, based on what I wanted to do and on my budget, of course. I simply want to learn how to take photographs because I am lucky to frequently found beautiful things. And I also see the world through my own distortion, or filter, that I would somehow like to explain.

Of course, eventually I want to share these things with the people I love. And if somebody else happens to be interested, naturally, that is wonderful too. But without forcing it, and without contributing to the spam that currently saturates the internet.

Is this what we have become? Some kind of rats running through mountains of garbage, that is, a mountain of recycled phrases, baseless opinions, poorly thought-out visceral reactions, photographs and more photographs, and even worse, all of it now multiplied by artificial intelligence.

I am honestly tired of it.

And even worse, the appearing of personalized advertisements. Whoever came up with that idea must have been a genius. Was this something people had understood for a long time? I don't know. It is an incredible idea to me. In the past, we watched advertisements on television, in newspapers, or in magazines that were designed to an specific groups of people with similar interests.

But an advertisement made specifically for you, that is something weird.

We never saw it coming, our data would be used this way, and nobody warned us. By the time we realized what was happening, it was already too late.

And yet, we were happy at first. There were new ways to communicate, new ways to discover music. Indie rock, for example, emerged thanks to MySpace. Interesting protest movements started on Twitter. But after all this time, I feel cheated.

More disturbing still is when advertisements slip into your life as if your mind had revealed a secret, something you have not even managed to put into words to tell a friend.

Or, sadder still, intimidation delivered directly to your home. More intimately, into your own room.

When I moved to the United States, the anti-immigration campaign was very intense. One night, just before going to sleep, I opened YouTube and an intimidating video appeared telling me that if I was an undocumented immigrant, I should return to my country. If I turned myself in, they would make things easier for me. If they found me, things would become difficult.

Well, perhaps the advertisement are not that personalized, because I entered the United States legally. Or perhaps the intention was simply to irritate all of us.

We will never know.

And then, the cherry on top.

I look at people I know, some of them seemingly losing their minds, and perhaps, I am losing mine too.

Frivolity. Consumerism. Simplicity. Loss of memory and awareness.

Everyone telling their own story inside a virtual world, as long as nobody actually sees them for who they are.

Of course, we have always followed characters on television. Sometimes we tried to imitate them, the way they spoke, the way they dressed, even the cigarettes they smoked.

But honestly, I am tired of seeing so many bad stories that do not really exist.

And if everyone now lives inside their own universe, honestly, that makes me feel lonely.

So I closed my social media accounts.

I still communicate with my close friends and colleagues anyway. There is always a way to reach a friend and talk for a while.

And I hope you do that with me too.

I hope we can sit down and have a cup of coffee together.

Gerardo Urrutia

Santa Cruz, California, 31st August, 2026