Bitcoin has melted down over the past week, and the internet is awash with pontificators claiming to know why. Fear has gripped the market and is squeezing hard. People are shouting that it’s all over. BTC is going to zero and the world will implode like a collapsing star. Will any of this happen? I have no idea.

But when I step outside, breathe, and walk around the garden, a different world reveals itself. The real one. The place your body actually inhabits. The place where you have real interactions with real people. Remember it? It may be time people in 2026 think more carefully about their use of the internet - social media in particular. X, especially, can be a vile place to spend too much time.

The algorithm feeds users a steady concoction of fear, anxiety, hate, and conspiracy, and many, me included, have had to step back. On the surface, X looks like a global town square where scholars, artists, and everyday people exchange ideas and debate the future. In theory, that should support the free flow of knowledge a healthy democracy needs. And yes, open discussion does happen there. Ideas bounce around like pinballs. But the driver of what you see is not truth or value. It’s engagement.

The algorithm likely understands your impulses better than most people in your life. It maps your fears, preferences, and reactions, then serves content designed to keep you agitated and clicking. The same emotional volatility that drives market panics also drives engagement metrics. Is this good for society? I don’t think so. Yet many people depend on the platform for business and visibility and treat it as a necessary evil. It’s something they wish they used less but feel they can’t leave. ‘What about the opportunity cost?’ they ask themselves as they emerge from another doom-scrolling session.

As an experiment, I open X to see what appears.

The first video shows a glass-bottom swimming pool attached to a skyscraper. A man jumps in, chaos follows, and the structure appears to give way. Pure shock bait.

Scroll.

Next video: archival footage of the Twin Towers burning, zoomed in on a figure at a window. Thirty seconds designed to disturb and hook attention. It works.

Scroll.

Third video: a massive landslide crashing toward a motorway in China, narrowly missing traffic. Eleven seconds. Maximum adrenaline.

Three posts in a row. Each engineered to provoke fear or dread. Not an accident: an incentive structure.

For the first time in history, curated catastrophe has become a daily ritual rather than a rare shock. We no longer stumble upon horror; it is scheduled, optimized, and delivered. Not because it informs us, but because it hooks us. Attention is the product; agitation is the price.

So here’s my modest proposal, mainly to myself: log off a little sooner than you want to. Go outside before you feel ready. Touch something that isn’t made of glass and code. Markets will crash and recover. Narratives will rise and fall. The loudest voices online will still be loud tomorrow. But your nervous system is not designed to live inside a perpetual breaking-news ticker.

Bitcoin will recover soon enough. Panic is not a strategy. The internet will keep screaming either way. Meanwhile, the garden still grows, the air still moves, and reality, boring old analog reality, continues without asking for a single click. That’s a better place to put at least some of our attention.