I'd like you to consider for a moment: how many things are you plugged into at this very moment?
You learned to use a keyboard, you know the QWERTY layout without even thinking about it. You can Google and find knowledge on a whim. You're conditioned to stop at a red light, or walk across a busy road when the crosswalk signal turns green.
You browse the internet, check your emails, look at social media, watch shows you like, firehose yourself with all sorts of information that drenches your nervous system. Your datastream is rich with things happening 24/7.
When the Industrial Revolution came about and people traded their own muscular leverage for machine leverage, they plugged themselves into a system greater than themselves. You are no different; every modern convenience you have is a system you've plugged yourself into.
This is why I say: you are cybernetic. To a person 1,000 years ago, you'd look behaviorally unrecognizable in many ways. You're not dependent on candlelight: you can produce light from your hand.
People usually associate the term "cybernetics" with human implants - sleek and distinct enhancements to the human form both in musculature and cognition. That's the sexy Hollywood terminology.
However, cybernetics is literally just the study of information feedback and recursion. Why does your hand jump away immediately from a red-hot burning stove? Your nervous system snaps into action, sending countless electrical signals up to your brain, denoting a dangerous temperature for your body to operate at, and you respond automatically in kind.
That's it. Not movie magic.
Now, why do I bring all this up?
This week, I showed someone my journaling setup - the way I collect data on myself. They said something fascinating: "you're merging yourself with the machine!" Some folks I show it to think journaling is just a means of feel-good emotional dumping, which is a valid downstream effect, but its true utility is in collecting rich and fleeting feedback data. Things that are permanently missable in life. Things you can't get anywhere else - idiosyncratic data.
It's undeniable: we're merging closer with machines as the history of our species progresses. I already get a daily report from my monitoring AI agent (which takes my journal data and biometrics from wearables). By virtue of sample size for the human population, I'm probably not alone in this.
For the vast majority of human history (99.999...%), we've eyeballed our own systems. We still do, in many areas. However, we now have the opportunity to actually examine everything with the depth it deserves - and I for one refuse to let my life feel accidental.
Be well,
Michael Kirsanov
P.S.
When I was growing up, I put hundreds of hours into Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the GBA - there, you have permanently missable items and party members. If you progress too far into the story, you can't go back and recover those: not without restarting the game. Life has no such mechanism (as far as I am currently aware of). Every bit of data you do not collect today is permanently missable; as the saying goes, your memories are just re-remembered bits of the same event, until they become drowned out by recency bias.