The Algorithm Knows What You Want Before You Do

Have you noticed how the advertisements that follow you across the internet seem to know things about you that you have not even admitted to yourself? You glance at a pair of hiking boots on a Tuesday afternoon, and by Wednesday morning your phone, your laptop, your social media feeds, even the podcast you listen to on your commute have all conspired to remind you that those boots are still waiting.

You did not really want them. You were curious. But the machines treat curiosity as confession. They take your fleeting glance and amplify it into a longing, and then they sell the longing back to you as though it had been yours all along.

This is the strange new condition of being human in the twenty-first century: we are being desired at.

Vast systems, more patient than any salesman who ever lived, have been built to study the small flickers of our attention and to multiply them into wants we did not know we had. And because the work is invisible, because it happens in the gap between one scroll and the next, we rarely notice that our hearts are being shaped by hands we cannot see.

Christianity has a word for this danger, though it predates the algorithm by many centuries. The word is concupiscence: the wound in our desiring that came with the Fall, by which the appetites no longer naturally bend toward what is good.

Saint Paul described it with the clarity of a man who had felt it from the inside: ”I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15).

Paul is not speaking of weakness of will in some abstract sense. He is speaking of the experience every honest person knows, that what we want is itself something we cannot fully trust. Our desires arrive in us already bent, already half-formed by forces we did not authorize.

And now we have built a civilization whose most profitable industries exist to bend them a little further.

 

The Heart as the Battlefield

The Scriptures are not naive about this. ”Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4:23) is not advice for the sentimental. It is military counsel.

The heart, in the biblical imagination, is not the seat of feelings as we moderns think of it. It is the deep center of the person, where thought, will, memory, and love converge.

It is the place where you decide who you are by deciding what you love.

And the writer of Proverbs knows what we are slow to admit: that this center is under constant siege. The springs of your life flow from there. Poison the spring, and you poison everything downstream.

Augustine understood this better than almost anyone. His Confessions begin with the line that has echoed through sixteen centuries of Christian reflection: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You” (Confessions I.1.1).

What is striking is not only the famous conclusion but the premise hidden inside it.

Augustine is saying that the human heart has a shape. It was made for a specific Good, and it cannot be tricked into permanent satisfaction by any substitute, no matter how cleverly designed. Every counterfeit happiness eventually exposes itself precisely by failing to satisfy. The restlessness is not a malfunction. It is the heart’s refusal to accept anything less than what it was made for.

This is good news, though it does not always feel like it.

It means that no matter how sophisticated the engineered want, no matter how precisely calibrated to your weaknesses, it cannot finally take the place of the Good that is good in itself.

The advertisers can manufacture desire. They cannot manufacture peace.

The restlessness you feel after acquiring what they told you would complete you is not a sign that you bought the wrong thing. It is a sign that you were made for something the market cannot sell.

 

The Little Children Inside

Saint John of the Cross, the Carmelite reformer and mystic, gave us one of the most piercing images in the spiritual tradition for what the disordered appetites are like. He says they “resemble little children, restless and hard to please, always whining to their mother for this thing or that, and never satisfied” (Ascent of Mount Carmel I.6.6).

Anyone who has been near an actual toddler in a grocery store will recognize the picture instantly. The child does not really want the candy. The child wants the having of the candy, and then the having of the next thing, and then the next, in a chain that no purchase will ever break.

This is what John saw happening in the soul. The appetites are not evil in themselves. God made us to desire.

But after the Fall, the appetites lost their proper order. They no longer know how to want the right things in the right amounts at the right times. They simply want, and want, and want, and their wanting is exhausting to the soul that tries to satisfy them all.

What is haunting about John’s image is how perfectly it describes the inner life of a person formed by the modern attention economy.

Scroll, refresh, scroll, refresh.

The little child inside is never appeased.

The next post, the next purchase, the next notification promises to settle the matter, and never does. We have not invented a new disease. We have only built a machine that feeds the old one with industrial efficiency.

But John has more to say, and it is more hopeful than first appears. In a sentence that ought to be written above every screen, he observes that “it is not the things of this world that occupy the soul or cause it harm, since they enter it not, but rather the will and desire for them, for it is these that dwell within it” (Ascent I.3.4).

The things themselves are not the problem. The problem is what we have allowed to take up residence inside us. The advertisement is outside. The longing it cultivates is inside. And what dwells inside the soul is what shapes the soul.

This means that the spiritual work is not primarily a work of avoidance. You cannot simply build a wall high enough to keep the algorithms out, and even if you could, you would still be left with the disordered appetites you brought in with you.

The work is interior. It is the work of taking responsibility for what dwells within.

 

The Ordering of Loves

Augustine, again, gives us the framework. He speaks of the ordo amoris, the right ordering of loves. Virtue, he writes, is “nothing else than perfect love of God” (City of God XV.22), and rightly ordered love is to give each thing the love proportioned to its worth.

This can be a powerful diagnostic tool for our spiritual ailments.

The question is not only whether you love a thing. The question is whether you love it in proportion to what it actually is.

A meal is good. Loved in its proper proportion, it nourishes the body and gladdens the heart and becomes an occasion for gratitude. Loved out of proportion, it becomes gluttony, or anxiety, or vanity, or an idol. The meal did not change. The disorder is in the lover, not the loved.

What the modern attention economy does, now aided by complex and precise algorithms, is disorder our loves.

It magnifies small goods into apparent ultimate goods.

It takes the legitimate human desire for connection and inflates it into a craving for constant validation. It takes the legitimate human desire for beauty and inflates it into envy. It takes the legitimate human desire for knowledge and inflates it into the compulsive consumption of information that cannot be digested.

None of the underlying desires are evil. They have simply been pulled out of their proper proportion by systems designed to do exactly that.

The will is made for the universal good, and that no created thing can finally satisfy it. This is why every counterfeit, in the end, proves the original by failing to replace it.

The disappointment that follows every misplaced love is itself a kind of teacher, if we will listen to it. It is pointing us back to the only Good that is good simply because He is.

 

Practical Work for the Restless Heart

What, then, do we do? The temptation in writing about a problem this large is to end with sweeping exhortations that no one can actually apply. Let me offer instead some smaller, more honest counsel.

First, begin to notice. Most of the formation of our desires happens beneath the level of awareness. The single most disruptive thing you can do to the machinery of manufactured longing is to become aware of it operating. When you feel the sudden urge to buy something, to check something, to acquire something, pause for sixty seconds and ask: Where did this want come from? Was it in me an hour ago? Often you will find that the desire is a guest in your house that you did not invite. Naming it is the first step toward showing it the door.

Second, practice small refusals. Not because the things refused are evil, but because the muscle of refusal atrophies without exercise. Skip the purchase you could easily make. Close the app before you have finished scrolling. Leave the article unread. These are not heroic acts. They are repetitions, the small repetitions by which the disordered child inside is taught, gently, to be still.

Third, feed the proper hunger. The reason the counterfeits have such power is that the real Good is so rarely tasted. Silence, prayer, the slow reading of Scripture, the simple presence of another person without a screen between you, these are the foods the soul was actually made for. Begin with five minutes. The restless heart will protest. Let it. The little child inside will eventually grow quiet in the presence of the Mother it was actually looking for all along.

Finally, remember what you are. You were made, every one of you, for a Good that is good simply because He is. No engineered want can substitute for it. And the very disappointment you feel when the substitutes fail is itself a kind of mercy, the Good Itself calling you home through the failure of every counterfeit. ”As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1).

The longing is the proof. Do not let anyone sell it back to you for less than it is worth.