BIRDHOUSE. 🏡

Every time I go for a stroll, I pass my neighbor’s birdhouse. But the other day, I couldn’t help but ask myself: why do we even call it a birdhouse? Birds can’t actually live there. Sure, there’s a roof and walls, but these mean nothing to a bird. Plus, the seed inside serves only to keep them around just long enough for our fleeting amusement.

In some ways, social media is like a birdhouse. Every app has a “home page” but it’s not somewhere we can truly live. Most platforms offer a “feed”, but it serves only to keep us around just long enough for these platforms to extract our time, our attention, and our data.

The phrase, “home page” itself is a projection, a borrowed term from the physical world to make the digital world feel familiar and comforting. But this illusion masks a deeper truth: these platforms aren’t designed to be our homes. They’re designed to keep us circling back, much like birds flitting around the feeder, consuming just enough to stay, but never enough to truly settle.

What’s more unsettling is how adept we’ve become at building these digital birdhouses. Algorithms now learn about us, predict our desires, and serve an endless stream of curated content. It’s like a modern Cupid’s bow, aimed not at our hearts but our pupils.

Just because these structures exist in the digital ether doesn’t make them any less real. In fact, their intangibility makes them even more pervasive. Unlike a physical birdhouse that you can walk past or dismantle, social media infiltrates our lives, embedding itself in our routines, our relationships, and our sense of self. The harm it can cause—isolation, anxiety, distorted perceptions—isn’t tangible, but it’s deeply felt.

So the next time we find ourselves scrolling through our feeds, we should ask ourselves: Are we truly at home, or are we just another bird, lured in by the promise of something that’s never really there?