The Value of Getting Lost

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life obsessed with technology. Not because it was my job, and not because I thought it would become a career. I was interested in technology for the same reason people become interested in music, cars, or photography: it was fun. It made the world beyond mine feel reachable.

I remember finding ResExcellence when I was twelve. I wasn’t sent there by a feed. I was lost, looking for shareware, when wandered into a world. ResExcellence was devoted entirely to Mac theming: icons, interface elements, the look and feel of the whole system. It was maintained by people who cared about it. Artists made things and gave them away. I downloaded their work, left comments on the forums, and eventually got to know some of them over AIM.

What I remember most is that they treated me like someone worth talking to. I was twelve. They didn’t know that, or maybe they did and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was curious, and curiosity was enough to get you in the door. We all drifted apart eventually. But the feeling of that place stayed with me: a corner of the internet that existed because someone had decided it should, and that rewarded you for being curious enough to find it.

That feeling—stumbling into something made by a stranger out of private fascination—is what I’ve been trying to name for years. It wasn’t just discovery. It was evidence that the world was full of people caring deeply about unexpected things, and that you could find them if you looked. Care was visible in the work.

For a while, social media felt like a natural extension of that world. A way to keep up with friends, share interests, and find people who cared about the same strange things you did. It felt, briefly, like the internet getting more human.

Looking back, I think that window was shorter than it seemed. Somewhere along the way, social media stopped being a place to connect and became a stage. Everyone performing. Everyone auditioning. Everyone learning, consciously or not, to shape themselves for an audience.

Then the brands and power brokers arrived, of course. What changed was that their logic became the logic of the place. They had budgets, strategies, analytics dashboards, and entire teams devoted to capturing attention. They didn’t just join the conversation. They restructured it around themselves.

I remember opening a feed to see what my friends were doing and realizing that I wasn’t seeing my friends at all. I was moving through content placed there for me by people and systems I didn’t know.

Individuals learned to behave like brands because that was what the environment rewarded. The feeds filled with a kind of simulated humanity: everything calibrated, nothing quite real.

AI didn’t create that simulated humanity. But it did make it cheap, fast, and limitless. Synthetic images. Automated accounts. Manufactured engagement. Fabricated reviews. Outrage and expertise produced on demand. At the far end of that list is the one that unsettles me most: fake intimacy. The simulation of someone caring about you, rendered at scale, on demand, for their profit—and, somewhere in the margins, an ad for something you mentioned once in passing.

Once, effort was part of how we recognized care. Someone had taken the time to make the icon set, maintain the website, and answer the forum post. The work was evidence that a person had been there.

Money doesn’t make care impossible. Plenty of paid work is careful, generous, and alive. But once attention becomes the product, care becomes difficult to distinguish from strategy. That distinction is harder to make now. The surface appearance of effort, knowledge, affection, even intimacy can be produced without those things necessarily existing behind it. The problem isn’t that everything generated is worthless or false. It’s that the old evidence has become unreliable.

You begin to wonder whether anyone else is bothered by this—and whether anyone actually agreed to this at all.

I watched all of this happen and quietly stepped back. Sure, I still lurk. I still scroll. I still read. But I stopped contributing. I told myself it was the right call—that I was opting out of something hollow, that silence was a kind of integrity. But there was another part I was less honest about: I didn’t know what I had to say. I wasn’t sure anyone would care. And it was easier to watch than to make something and find out.

Stepping back created another problem. Social media had become more than a place where people shared their lives. It had become the place where those lives were registered. Birthdays, new jobs, new homes, children, losses, opinions, jokes, ordinary afternoons—everything arrived as a series of small signals that said: I am still here.

The physical world continued, of course. But social media became the layer through which much of it was made visible to everyone else.

It sounds melodramatic to say that not posting can make you feel dead. But the feed has become proof of life. The photographs stop. The opinions stop. The evidence stops accumulating. You may be living fully somewhere else, but within the shared social registry, you begin to disappear.

The deeper question I’ve been trying to understand isn’t really about platforms or algorithms. Those are symptoms. What lies underneath is harder to name.

Much of modern technology is designed to remove friction. We navigate without getting lost. We communicate without waiting. We shop without leaving home. We consume entertainment without ever reaching the end of it. We outsource memory to search engines and judgment to recommendation systems. In many ways, this is progress. Not all friction is worth defending. Some of it is exclusion, wasted effort, needless confusion. Removing it can make life more accessible and return time once spent fighting badly designed systems.

But some friction asks something of us. The effort involved in figuring things out for yourself has value. So does boredom, the kind that forces you to invent something to do with it. So does sitting with a question long enough to form an opinion before someone else’s arrives to fill the space. So does getting lost, literally and otherwise.

These aren’t merely inefficiencies to be engineered away. They are how thinking happens. They require memory, patience, judgment, and choice. They make us participants in an experience rather than recipients of one. They give us life. What we’ve built are systems designed to anticipate what we want before we’ve finished wanting it. We are guided everywhere, offered recommendations for everything, and nudged toward decisions before we’ve had time to discover our own preferences.

A map can be useful. A recommendation from someone you trust can enlarge your world. ResExcellence shaped my interests. The people there influenced me. Influence isn’t the enemy of agency. None of us forms a self alone. The problem begins when assistance becomes the atmosphere—when influence becomes continuous, difficult to see, and optimized for purposes that may not be ours. When it becomes hard to tell where our judgment ends and the system’s suggestion begins.

When you can no longer get lost, you also lose the chance to arrive somewhere no one selected for you. The result is something strange and hard to articulate: a feeling that parts of life are being authored for us. That we are living inside an experience someone else designed, optimized for our continued engagement, and that we drifted into it without ever making a conscious choice.

Sometimes I wonder whether the deepest cost isn’t privacy, time, or even attention, but agency. Not the ability to think without influence. That has never existed. Agency is the space to notice what shapes us, decide what to accept, and wander away from what has been laid out in advance.

A self is formed partly through what it notices, follows, rejects, and discovers. When more of those paths are chosen for us, the world may become easier to navigate. It may also become harder to know which direction we would have taken.

More than anything, I miss expressing myself.

That’s the sentence I avoided writing for a long time, because it felt too small and too large at once. Too small because it sounds like a personal problem. Too large because once I wrote it down, I’d have to do something about it. I spent years reading thoughtful, careful work on the internet and feeling glad it existed. Over time, that feeling curdled. Reading other people’s ideas had become deeply satisfying, but only in the way that admiration can be. Eventually, I realized I missed the satisfaction of contributing something myself. I started to wonder what I actually thought about anything, versus what I’d absorbed from the people I was reading.

Writing is one way to find out. It makes me wait. It makes me choose. It makes me remain with an uncertain thought instead of reaching immediately for someone else’s conclusion. It forces me to discover whether I have made an idea my own, and whether I still believe it once I’ve tried to put it into words. Writing is chosen friction.

I had accepted a false choice: perform or disappear. Owning a place offers another possibility. I can make something, put it somewhere I control, and let it remain what it is.

Stale Plastic is not a casino. It is a park.

A casino is designed to make leaving feel like an interruption. Its purpose depends on continued play.

A park is designed too, but it is designed to make room. A park has paths, but no required route. It has benches. It has open space. You can stay, wander, leave, or return. Your departure does not mean the park failed. A park can be cared for without trying to capture anyone.

Stale Plastic is my park because I get to tend to the place. I can decide what grows, where the paths lead, and whether they need to lead anywhere at all. I can play here on my own terms. And anyone who visits can do the same.

I can’t recreate the internet I found when I was twelve. Some of what I miss belongs to that age, and some of it belongs to a world that is gone.

But I can preserve one of its possibilities.

ResExcellence existed because someone had decided it should. It waited there without knowing I was coming. And I just happened to stumble upon it while I was lost.

Stale Plastic is my attempt to make something carefully, put it somewhere I control, leave the gate open, and trust curiosity to do the rest.