The Borrowed Life
What you consume is quietly becoming you.
I came across a clip of Gabriel Basso on The Tonight Show a few months back. You might know him from The Night Agent. He was talking about why he deleted Instagram, and the reason he gave stopped me cold.
He said he was doom-scrolling one day and a picture from the summit of Mount Everest appeared on his feed. And it pissed him off. “The guy literally stepped over bodies to get up there and see that view, and now I was seeing it from my couch.”
”I shouldn’t know what that looks like,” he said. “The view from the top of Mount Everest.”
He deleted the app that day.
Disgusted is the right word for it.
Not overwhelmed. Not distracted. Not even guilty. Disgusted. Because what happened in that moment wasn’t just mindless scrolling. Something was handed to him that he had no right to receive. The view from the summit of Everest is not content. It is the physical result of suffering. The months of training, the altitude sickness, the cold that gets into your bones at 29,000 feet, the bodies in the snow that didn’t make it. The people who reach the top don’t just see a view. They feel it in a way that is completely inseparable from everything they went through to get there. The meaning and the suffering are the same thing.
Strip the suffering out and you have a picture. A nice one. But just a picture.
And your brain, which cannot tell the difference between an earned experience and a borrowed one, files it away anyway. Moves on to the next thing. Keeps scrolling.
That’s the theft. Not of the climber’s moment, but of your own ability to be moved by something real.
And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud.
It’s not entirely our fault.
Leaving the house costs money now. A tank of gas, a meal, groceries, a coffee that used to be two dollars is now seven. The baseline cost of just existing outside your front door has gotten high enough that staying at home has become default for a lot of people. Not out of laziness. Out of math.
So you stay home. And the feed is right there. And the feed is free.
But free is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Because what you’re actually paying is your dopamine. Every scroll is a microdose of stimulation your brain didn’t earn. Every video from someone else’s summit, someone else’s life, someone else’s moment, trains your brain to expect that level of input without any corresponding output from you. Do that long enough and the ordinary texture of your own life starts to feel insufficient. Quiet feels boring. Stillness feels like a problem to solve. You reach for the phone before you even realize you’re reaching.
The depression spike follows. The inability to connect with other people follows. All of it downstream from the same source: you let someone else’s life become the primary input of your own.
Basso didn’t delete Instagram because he was disciplined. He deleted it because he recognized something being taken from him.
That’s the distinction that matters. This isn’t about being anti-technology or pretending social media doesn’t exist. It’s about understanding what you’re trading when you let the algorithm decide what enters your mind. Every image it serves you without your consent is a tiny substitution. A borrowed experience filed in the place where a real one could have lived. Enough of those and you have a life that feels strangely full and completely empty at the same time.
He said something else on that show that stuck with me. Fallon asked if he could unsee it, the Everest picture. And Basso said no. That’s what I’m saying. It should have been yours, he said. If you make it to the top, that view is yours.
You can’t unconsume what you’ve already consumed. But you can decide what gets in from here.
Be vicious about your inputs. Not because some productivity framework told you to, but because your inputs are quietly becoming your life. The content you consume, the accounts you follow, the feeds you let run while you’re lying in bed at midnight, all of it is shaping what feels normal to you, what feels possible, what feels like enough.
Optimize those and you have no choice but to live inside your own life. The output takes care of itself.
I still haven’t been to the top of anything worth stepping over bodies for.
But I’m a lot more careful about what views I let myself see for free.