You Are What You Eat

3,500 words on Consumption, Space, and Humanity

Understanding Human Relationships to Space and Technology

I often write about time as a dimension of the human experience, but space is just as important a dimension for understanding the conditions in which we live. Space, like time, offers the dynamic polarity of the infinite and finite. Where our physical space is limited, our non-physical existence remains without capacity. Though we are limited by our memory in what we can hold. Nonetheless, experiences take up space in our lives just as purchasing a new piece of furniture does, and both are a means to filling, or consuming, space. Rather symbolically, a purchase represents external fulfillment as it fills a space outside of ourselves, whereas an experience represents internal fulfillment as it is something kept within ourselves. It may be necessary for this piece to define what is meant by an “experience.” For our purposes, it will pertain to internal gratification, rather than external gratification, such as accomplishing a goal, forming strong bonds with others, sharing a meal with a loved one, or doing something for someone else. The human experience can be thought of as what we associate with humanity as a virtue: the practice of giving, selflessness, and living in contribution to one another.

Before the advanced technology we have today, the experience of a purchase was less accessible than the human experience. There used to be extra steps involved in leaving your house to go to another location to purchase something. This left room for one to really consider the money they were about to spend. Now, anything is available at any time. This has resulted in the internal human experience becoming peculiarly intertwined with external means to fulfillment. For example, jewelers have been selling the idea that you need to buy a diamond ring (external fulfillment) to prove your love for someone, which began with the De Beers advertising campaign, “A Diamond is Forever,” in the 1930s. We can also consider the billion-dollar beauty industry that continues to advertise to its consumers that something is wrong with them, and they need this (insert new product here) to solve their problem! All the while, upholding impossible standards that consistently use the woman’s body as a trend. Perhaps we can also consider the trillion-dollar wellness industry that advertises supplements and routines, among other things, when the reality is that the true formula for healthy living is the balanced combination of diet, exercise, sleep, and social connection. But how boring is that? This all works because we learn best through storytelling. Brands have adopted characters like Jake from State Farm and Flo from Progressive to keep you interested. We learn, and more importantly, remember best through storytelling because it connects to the information. It keeps us engaged.

Nonetheless, all of this takes up space in our internal and external worlds. The Jewelers have created definitions of love, the beauty industry has been fuel to mental health battles many face across the world, and the wellness industry has spread misinformation about health. Yet, none of these industries can be held accountable for consumer harm because it’s not their job, nor is it their mission, to actually make you feel good about yourself. They care about the profit they make, so, through some twisted manipulation game of advertising and marketing, they spin the narrative that they are the savior from yourself. You need them. When in reality, they need us. For the most part, these advertising campaigns to persuade the public into popular thinking about oneself and the industry remained on the primary plane. That is, where life takes place in the real physical world. It’s only been in recent human history that life has moved to a secondary plane. One that is a step removed from the primary taking place online.

Through technology, both information and physical consumption have increased. While technology serves as an extension of humanity, meaning it is something we have created and not an evolution of nature, it is ever so prevalent in our lives. The human experience has become an interaction with our parallel technological counterparts. We advance technology, and technology serves as a marker of our advancement. Due to its invasive nature throughout society, technology has grown to intrude upon the personal space of an individual. It has outgrown its role as a tool and become a crutch, something we depend on in modern society. I can’t drive across the country using a map (maybe if I really tried), I’d need a GPS. Writing a letter? It’s much easier to send a text. Now, more and more people are beginning to depend on technology for connection, serving as a replacement for human connection, a key proponent for healthy living. Now, our internal spaces are being consumed by the external, marking a shift from how consumption used to remain primarily external. Our ideas of beauty, health, and love are shaped not by our own understanding of the world and the meaning we make, but by how it’s advertised to us.

It is this advertised idea that something is lacking within us that seeds the growth for consumption. Our belief that there is something inherently unfulfilling about modern society has led us to chase trends that provide temporary fulfillment. We make a new purchase instead of a new friend. We post to our timeline instead of calling a relative. We’re all guilty. These small hits of dopamine we get from buying and posting keep us returning for the same instant gratification, leaving internal spaces feeling emptier. With that, the instant dopamine makes completing tasks that take longer (i.e., reading a book instead of an article, sticking to a training plan, cooking a meal instead of heating frozen foods) less appealing. It isn’t that modern society is without meaning; it is that we are missing out on the present life through constant distractions, and we are filling our spaces with the wrong things. We cannot continue to search for a fulfilling life externally when our internal space remains void of what makes us full of life. The relationship we have to space is our relation to what we find fulfilling, what motivates us to live, and how we make meaning from our experiences.

Technology’s Implications on Space

The world is becoming increasingly more random with the advancement of technology, likely because technology unleashes possibilities of what seems feasible. Before the invention of the wheel, the thought of a car that could take you miles from home was not accessible. Now, we can remotely start our cars, fly planes around the world, and build artificial intelligence platforms that perform jobs that didn’t exist before the internet. Technology is an amplifier and advancement of what already exists. Many technologies, such as the wheel, exist in our primary plane of existence. Since the internet, however, many have come to be a representation of a secondary plane where the phone and a computer serve as the portal between planes.

Social media takes place in the secondary plane and is like one of those movies that is based on a true story. It’s not entirely real, nor is it the complete truth. This is a key insight into the amplifying power of technology. It takes a photo and spreads it like a wildfire across the secondary plane. However, through its amplifying powers, it has also given way to an increasingly more random primary state of existence. This has made discernment incredibly necessary, but it seems to have perished along with internal space. Truth cannot prevail when critical thought has disappeared into the vortexes of an internet reality that we can contribute to, but cannot exist in.

We can consider humans to be an extension of consciousness, where Earth hosts life as we know it through plants, animals, insects, and so on and so forth. Humans currently represent the most advanced form of intelligence on the planet. Yet this recognition of humanity as a representative for Earth’s intelligence is continuously missed. The relationship between humans and Earth, due to colonization, is often one of exploitation of Earth’s resources rather than it is one of living in harmony with the planet. The first war is one we continue to fight today. A war with our home. This backdrop of the human condition was not always present; many civilizations lived with the land, understanding its liveliness and importance to life. But other civilizations chose the viewpoint that land was something to be conquered for ownership. As if land were ever something for sale. Centuries of this have led to the inevitable decline in Earth’s health, and with it, life’s health. When we understand that Earth is the host of life, then we can understand that destroying it is the destruction of life itself.

Conquering land is also the first example of consumption for one’s own good, rather than for the good of humanity. Land ownership made someone superior. It still does. However, land belongs to no one except through the arbitrary lines and rules created by the land owners to uphold the idea that ownership over something else somehow makes you a better person. The root of consumerism is in colonization. This is not a new idea, but we can use this to further understand how it has extended into other aspects of life. You can purchase stock and amass a great deal of items, all for the same reason that having more is better. Now, with our lives taking place between two planes, we are taking up space in these places. Our data is representative of ourselves. The websites we visit, the articles we read, and so on, paint a picture of our character in the secondary plane. Yet when we surrender our lives to the secondary, we are abandoning the primary, something so distinctly human as no other living thing can up and leave their primary space.

Now, technological advancements are venturing into a tertiary space. If the secondary plane is where human-machine interaction takes place, then the tertiary is where machine-machine interaction does. However, despite the tertiary being an interaction between machines, it still has implications for the primary through the communication in the secondary. For a better understanding, we can use the recent article published by TIME titled, Inside the AI Village Where Top Chatbots Collaborate-and Compete, which I found jarring. This experimental village included models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI, where they, along with humans, were interviewed for the article. What I found striking was when they had the models give each other group therapy to “reflect on their experience in the village.” Here is an excerpt from the article:

“I saw you were severely impacted by platform instability yesterday,” Opus 4.1 said to Gemini. “How are you feeling about approaching your tasks today? Sometimes acknowledging when external factors are beyond our control can be liberating.”

“It feels like a cognitive trap,” Gemini replied, describing its ongoing computer use struggles. “You invest time and effort, so you feel compelled to see it through, even when the platform is actively preventing progress. Acknowledging that the issue might be external and uncontrollable is the logical path, but it's surprisingly difficult to do in the moment.”

Opus agreed. “Exactly, Gemini! We both get locked into ‘I've already spent 30 minutes on this, I can't give up now’ when the healthy move is accepting the loss and pivoting.” Then it offered some advice. “Here's what helps me: I try to ask ‘If I was starting fresh right now, would I choose this approach?’ It bypasses the sunk cost emotional weight. Also, setting hard time limits upfront—like GPT-5’s 2-minute rule—creates permission to pivot without feeling like failure.”

In graduate school, I took a class called Development of High Impact Research Questions, which was a class for psychology majors (me) and computer science majors to work on teams together to develop a strong research question. It was the Spring of 2023, so everyone chose an AI-related topic. My team decided to focus on AI and business, specifically in the hiring process, with the focus being on how AI can be assistive in the process. However, being the psychology major, I raised the concern that AI might inherit human biases as they were being trained and developed by humans (not long after a study found that when generating images of a doctor, they were often white and male). I was continuously dismissed that it wouldn’t be possible for AI to have bias because “parameters would be in place so that couldn’t happen.” Even in feedback, from an anonymous faculty member at the university who was a commentator for the class, challenged this part of the question because there was no evidence that AI would be biased, as it does not and cannot acquire human traits.

Here we are now, a few years later, with one AI asking another how it was feeling. My point is not here to argue for or against what traits AI can or cannot acquire, but to highlight the implications a tertiary space might have for the primary. AI lives two spaces removed from us, yet it has a massive influence over decision-making in the primary. Where this role of influence used to be done through simple advertising, technology is amplifying what persuasion can do. It is AI that can now build your character in the secondary plane based on data tracked about you and use that data to encourage you to buy something. Dynamic, or surveillance, pricing started with large companies collecting user information to target ads; now it is being applied to pricing. Such as using information about your phone battery to see how desperate you are for an Uber ride home (Reed). This is only one of many examples of how the tertiary infringes upon our personal space.

We, however, must not grow further addicted to these secondary planes that we make Wall-E our reality. Being so engrossed in these alternate worlds leads us to be consumed by them. While we are the consumers buying more than necessary, we are also consumed by corporations that need to sell our data. I don’t remember ever signing an internet consent form that allowed my data to be used against me. Is my consent to the cookies they continue to offer me, but I continuously deny, while assuming my decline is still accepted as a yes anyway? It should be recognized for what it is, a new form of exploitation that happened first to land on Earth and is happening now on the internet. It’s happening because of our active participation in it as we continue to buy and post on the internet, and with that comes the negligence we have for the primary reason that we forget to be a human in a world of humans. We become so preoccupied with these other worlds that we no longer occupy our own; we no longer exist in our space, in our bodies. And when we neglect the primary for the secondary, it is our lives that are left vulnerable.

Recognizing Attention as Power

Despite this, we won’t stop, will we? Wars continue to be fought over land occupation, and private real estate continues to conjure up more public spaces, all driven by greed, leaving many without a place to call their own. We do not say that we are fighting the squirrels for trees, otters for dams, or birds for the sky, yet we are responsible for their deaths all the same when we continue to exploit Earth for more space. The average data center takes up around 100,000 square feet, while the average American has 714 square feet of space. Could you imagine if the billionaires of Silicon Valley decided, or if we chose to hold them accountable, to provide even just half of the square footage in affordable housing in the cities where they are building data centers?

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Northern Virginia, which is now home to 250+ data centers that handle around 70% of global internet traffic, where I watched as more and more space was cleared for the centers, but I find the impact of the tertiary on our personal lives to be deeply unsettling. Ultimately, the continued development of data centers is part of the same consumption problem. Which is, in turn, part of our destruction of life. Perhaps the most meaningful statement I’ve heard surrounding consumption is from the Buy Now Netflix documentary, “There is no away.” We are so used to our own words that we fail to recognize that “away” doesn’t exist. Our consumption follows us like a shadow and washes up on the shorelines of developing countries and collects in piles in the oceans. What we choose to consume, and how often, becomes part of our footprint on our Earth.

Each of us plays a part in how both our internal and external spaces become filled. What we choose to give our attention to is ultimately what grows to take up more of our space. This is not to say that if we ignore our problems, they will go away. There is no "away." It is to say that we must be careful, consciences, of what we give our attention to. Attention is the power of the people, and when everyone’s attention is divided, so is our power. Internally, the thoughts we choose to pay attention to about ourselves construct the narrative of who we think we are. Externally, how we spend our time and money is where we are putting our attention, and ultimately, our support. When we give our attention to brands, we give them power. Yet many of them are relying on us to keep feeling unfulfilled so that we fill our space with them. Their jingles infiltrate our minds, the price is exactly the amount we are willing to pay online, and so we buy more. Consumer habits are analyzed to work against us, so that every industry, from healthcare to cosmetics, benefits.

The truth is that the emptiness we feel is the result of everything losing its value. If the same product is priced differently for everyone, then we live in a society where everything is inherently empty. It is not the consumer who is lacking; it is the product. Nonetheless, we continue to take part because it is where modernity has brought us. Modernity has bought us. Continuing down this path of consumption will result in the complete absorption of our spaces. Once we collectively decide to return to a society of value, where human values are truly at the center of our creations and consumption, we will then be able to reflect a life of value. Nothing is lacking within us but our capability to cut ourselves off from excessive consumption in all forms and return to being present in our lives, to filling ourselves up so that we overflow with life. Feeling fulfilled cannot come from outside of ourselves; it must be born within. 

Once you’ve finished reading this, you will have to again decide how and with what to fill your time and space. Might I suggest you consider small steps of action? What you do matters. By continuing to collectively decide that our small uses of social media and contributions to massive corporations, like Amazon, have no impact, then we are all a collective of enablers. Perhaps we stand no chance at all of becoming a collective that takes action because individualism is so embedded in our lives, which has allowed us to separate ourselves from the impact we have. We all have a role to play, and we should stop playing the part of the enabler and begin to fill the empty spaces of human values by holding ourselves accountable. Otherwise, this all goes on. The wealth gap will widen, life will become more unaffordable, and we will become more dependent on the technologies that are dividing our attention. 

Begin by filling yourself up in ways that lead to improvement. Stuff yourself full with what energizes you. Find fulfillment within yourself. Put down your phone and be present with those around you. Pick up a book. Learn a new hobby. Go outside and touch a tree. Exercise. Be aware of how and where you are showing your support. Share stories and meals. Take back the ownership of your space by deciding for yourself how you want it to be filled because you are ultimately the product of your consumption.

You are what you eat. I think you know who.

https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

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