Whats up ya'll? This is a little different than what I usually send out. It's quite a bit longer and I feel like its important. If you read this one, I'd love to hear what you think!

The Shimmer, the Nervous System, and Attention

I have waited my whole life to enter a place like this. Knowledge unbounded. Access to information I used to dream about. I look around at the endless stacks, and my mind can’t even comprehend the immensity of what I hold in my hand.

I pause. I whisper a prayer to Athena, goddess of wisdom. Humbly, I bow to the truth: I have access to more knowledge than the greatest kings, queens, and rulers of old. More than entire civilizations could hold in their libraries. And yet here it is, at my fingertips.

It is as if I walk freely into the Library of Alexandria, not once in a lifetime, but every single day. And like most of us, I often enter without reverence, without intention, blind to the majesty of what I’m carrying.

If I’m going to be a conscious human with a tool this powerful, I have to become intentional. Maybe even ritualistic. I imagine creating an opening ceremony every time I step into this vast library. I suspect two things would happen: first, my attention would restore, and I’d stop being a cog in somebody else’s machine. And second, my relationship with the Internet itself would become sacred, magical, mysterious, worthy of reverence.

This may sound dramatic, and that’s only because the Internet has become so interwoven with daily life that you’ve forgotten how insane it actually is. In 2025, there is no world without it. The Internet is as integrated into our lives as food, water, sleep, or nature. No matter what you do, escaping it is nearly impossible.

In this piece, I use the name The Shimmer, a term Erick Godsey borrowed and adapted from the novel and film Annihilation. In his framing, The Shimmer is a mythic metaphor for the Internet: beautiful, dangerous, endlessly generative, and destructive if approached unconsciously.

I am not going to go in-depth into the aspects of the Shimmer Erick lays out. So if you aren’t familiar with his presentation, I encourage you to pause now and go check that out. Here’s a link to his podcast. ​

Here is the reality: if your relationship with The Shimmer is unconscious, it will fucking ruin you. Not because it’s evil, but because your nervous system was never designed to metabolize this much input, this much novelty, this much predation on your attention. You will sustain mental injuries. Your focus will scatter. Your capacity to direct attention toward what matters will collapse.

Think of it like eating nothing but ice cream, candy, and soda for years on end. Your body would fail eating that level of bullshit. Likewise, consuming digital sugar, scrolling without intention, bouncing from dopamine hit to dopamine hit, will destroy your system. The algorithms are designed for exactly that.

So before we even talk about The Shimmer, we have to step upstream. We have to talk about your nervous system.

Nervous System States

Your nervous system is the lens through which you experience reality. When you’re regulated, you are calm, connected, present, and you can meet the world as it actually is. But when you’re dysregulated, stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, you don’t see clearly. You’re relating to the present through the wiring of your past. Looking through a film negative and seeing an alternate reality. Psychologists call this projection.

Here’s an example of that.

So, imagine you grew up in an environment where performance was everything. You were expected to get straight A’s, play sports, and engage in extracurriculars. You were supposed to look polished at all times. In that world, love felt conditional; it was something you earned only by being perfect.

Fast forward. As an adult, part of you still believes you’re unworthy of love unless you nail everything. So you try and do that. And you end up exhausted and overwhelmed. You are constantly striving to look like you have it all together, and it drains you because it’s an impossible task

But you can’t let it go. Every time you try, you feel so uncomfortable that you want to crawl out of your skin. And that’s because your nervous system is still stuck in the state that once kept you safe. On some level, in your adult brain, you know that people do, in fact, love you, they want you around, but you are still fretting over making sure you are always on time, your hair is perfect, and you talk and sound like all of your shit is perfectly together.

While that is difficult, at least it's familiar. At least you know how to be that way. As opposed to being more authentic and allowing folks to see how you really are, and to then give you their love. Which, by the way, would be more authentic because they are actually loving you for you, not for your performance.

But that's a different rabbit hole to go down.

So this is what I mean when I say your nervous system dictates your reality. And here is a sad reality: most modern folks live dysregulated 90% of the time. For some, that shows up as hyperarousal, which looks like anxiety, urgency, scattered energy. For others, it’s hypoarousal, which looks like collapse, depression, or numbness. And when stress goes beyond what you can cope with, the system flips: you push through hyper until you burn out, and then you crash into hypo.

Now add The Shimmer on top of that. A dysregulated nervous system with a device in its pocket that can deliver infinite outrage, novelty, and comparison at light speed. It’s like handing a bottle of vodka to someone already drunk.

A Practice of Noticing

If you’re reading this and thinking, shit, that’s me, but you don’t know how to actually track what’s happening, let me give you a practice. This is simple, but if you run it three times a day for a week, you’ll start to see your patterns. Once you see them, you can work with them.

First, make micro-contact. Pause for twenty seconds. Feel your feet on the floor, your seat in the chair, the movement of your breath. Let your jaw soften. Let your eyes settle on one thing in the room. Nothing to fix here, you are just arriving, long enough to tell what’s actually happening.

Next, place your dot. What is the simplest shape of this feeling? Pleasant or unpleasant. High energy or low. If you imagine a cross with those two lines, where would you put yourself? Maybe “unpleasant, high energy” before a hard conversation. Or “pleasant, low energy” after a walk. This isn’t time to analyze, its just time to notice and take a snapshot.

Then, ask the honest movement question. Given this feeling, what does my body want to do? Move toward? Pull away? Go still? Fawn? Speak? Go quiet? Reach for the phone? Pour a drink? Open the fridge? Write down the first answer that shows up. We are not judging here, and we are not trying to fix anything. We are just being curious and seeing what comes up immediately.

Fourth, widen the window by one notch. If the impulse is to pull away, stay with the sensation for one full breath before you act. Feel your feet while you do it. If the impulse is to rush in, slow down, your words, your steps, by five percent. Stay connected to the original sensation as you adjust. You are not trying to fight your body here; you are increasing your capacity to stay with it.

Finally, track and reflect. At the end of the day, write two simple lines: Where did I move toward? Where did I move away? Did those movements serve me? If not, what one notch might I try next time? Over time, autonomy grows by noticing sooner and choosing with your body online.

Here are some possible examples to help guide you and show you what this looks like.

• Before a conflict: “Unpleasant, high energy. My body wants to speed up. One breath. Speak one clear sentence slowly.”
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• Before the phone: “Unpleasant, low energy. My body wants relief. One breath. Do the one task I named. Put it down.”
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• Before food or a drink: “Unpleasant, high energy. My body wants to change this feeling. One breath. If I still choose it, I will stay in contact while I eat or sip.”

Rumination, Collapse, and The Shimmer

Here’s why this matters. Dysregulation doesn’t just make you anxious or tired, it warps your attention. One of the most common signs of mental injury is rumination.

Rumination is looping thoughts that center on yourself and make you feel like shit. I should have said this. Why didn’t I do that? I’m never going to get it right. You obsess over things you can’t fix. And the longer you sit there, the worse it gets.

First comes anxiety, the urgency to act. But no action will solve the loop. So then you stay longer and you hit overwhelm, then collapse into depression.

Now imagine that’s your inner state, and on top of it, you’re scrolling The Shimmer. Infinite information, infinite comparisons, infinite algorithms designed like slot machines to keep you hooked. It’s not neutral. It’s predatory.

It’s like walking into a haunted house when you’re already panicked. The walls shift to show you what you fear most. They know exactly how to keep you moving, even when you want to leave. You stumble out the other side exhausted, depleted, unable to give or receive love.

That’s what you’re doing every time you log onto algorithm-driven platforms while dysregulated.

So, why the hell would you treat yourself that way? Would someone who loves themselves willingly enter that?

And now, of course, I am going to hear from some people who say, “I don’t love myself.”

Bull shit. That’s not your voice .That's the voice of a critic or someone else that you internalized. You do and you can.

And to access that, it will require micro steps day in and day out to reclaim and recapture your nervous system and your attention.

Reverence and Boundaries

I started this piece with gratitude because it matters. The Internet is miraculous. It holds abundance we can barely fathom. It’s a library, a teacher, a community, an archive of human knowledge and creativity.

And it will ruin you if you enter unconsciously.

This is the tension we have to hold. It’s not all good or all bad. It’s sacred and it’s dangerous. It’s a gift and it’s a trap.

If we lived in a conscious society, we would prepare people before handing them access. We’d have initiations. Rituals. Training in nervous system regulation before you ever touch a smartphone. But we don’t. We hand devices to toddlers and worship corporations that profit from our dysregulation.

So you have to become your own initiate. You have to ground yourself, build reverence, and set boundaries.

Here’s my extreme take, and I rarely use absolutes: never enter The Shimmer if you are dysregulated. Don’t do it. Pause first. Notice your state. Breathe. Move your body. Do something else before defaulting to the fucked-up haunted hell waiting for you.

Because these platforms are designed to dysregulate you. If you go in already off-balance, they will shred you. They’ll steal your attention, scatter your memory, deepen your despair, and leave you gasping for air.

A Call to Consciousness

This is a call to treat your relationship with The Shimmer with more intentionality than anything else in your daily life. More than food. More than work. More than hobbies. Because it shapes all of those things.

So, like, here’s the distilled call to action:

• Don’t log in when you’re dysregulated.
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• Build rituals of entry.
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• Learn your nervous system so you can tell when you’re grounded.
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• Treat the Internet as both sacred and predatory.
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This may sound intense. But I fucking mean it. If you don’t build a conscious relationship with your nervous system, you will be eaten alive.

And if you do? Then, The Shimmer becomes a place of awe. A place of creativity. A place where you can direct your attention, your most sacred resource, toward building a life and a world worth living in.