Making Technology Human
Here in the real world, we can never be as pristine and polished as our social media avatars would have people believe…
In the vast realm of the internet, somewhere between motivational videos, pseudo-psychology tweets, and Instagram therapy infographics — a prevailing discourse on mental health and wellness has taken shape.
The defining characteristic for this type of content is its penchant for solitude, along with all the visual trappings of corporate success narratives. It’s best seen on TikTok — where constant images of lean, green, “healed” individuals engage in solitary activities like studying, exercising, or attending therapy.
I call this genre Tiktopia.
As far as life on earth goes, TikTopia has an alluring sales pitch: follow this formula, and you too can liberate yourself from your innate human impulses, release the burden of intense emotions, and step into your superior, sanitized self.
Everyday is the same in TikTopia — an algorithmic assembly line of perfect people, free from the folly of human conceits.
The videos depict a world devoid of conflict, pain, and uncertainty — without the overwhelming waves of emotion that often leave people traumatized or in tears.
Drink the gut-healing potion, swallow the happy pills, and be on your merry way.
There’s no heartbreak or hurting. It’s passionless and painless — a disney-fied, death-adjacent space of daydreams.
Unlike real life, where people can lose their jobs, their partners or their sanity, TikTopia is a cult of one. There is nobody outside of ourselves, there is no past and no future, there is only now. It’s all about absorption in the minutiae of the moment.
But down here in the real world, we can never be as pristine and polished as our social media avatars would have people believe. We can also never be free of our feelings, or the obligations of tomorrow. We’re primal creatures. We’re happy, we’re sad. We’re hypocrites who live in glass houses and throw stones.
“The Crown was born from the real need to make technology human”
When I was first designing the prototype for The Crown, I wanted to get one thing across to our customers:
Your life can be messy, just like mine. Your flaws aren’t a laundry list of things you have to eliminate in order to reach an enhanced status. And when you’ve dug yourself such a deep hole, no carefully curated stack of self-help books will help you climb out of it.
These ideas, as attractive as they may seem, don’t turn us into better versions of ourselves — they turn us into robots, cyborgs, automatons — cheap imitations of our raw selves.
The Crown was born from the real need to make technology human again. To have a product that works with our nature, rather than against it.
It measures your own personal workflow, highlighting when you’re most focused, and when you’re not — so you can plan your day around it. I’ve struggled with depression enough to know that life doesn’t come to a standstill just because you’re not feeling up to it.
Like they say on Twitter, can we normalize being normal?
We don’t live in TikTopia and we can’t predict what’s around the corner. Whether it’s a depressive day during an otherwise pleasant week, or writer’s block during a harsh deadline. Our life’s energy ebbs and flows. But if we can predict how we’ll respond to trials and tribulations, we can get through them without losing a piece of ourselves in the process.
The Crown helps to map out our mental activity, revealing a pattern of our most productive hours of the day.
Using our own brainwaves, it allows us to tap into our innate bio-cycles.
It works like this:
A student with ADHD can shift into focus and get the most out of their study sessions.
A person who works in stressful environments can drown out the noise and overstimulation to boost their productivity.
A person with anxiety can take out few minutes of their day to get into a calmer and clearer headspace.
This list is not exhaustive, it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how our proprietary Crown can bring back the human touch in our highly digitized lives.
You might be thinking “isn’t the Crown also part of that digitized technology?” and you’re not wrong. But the truth is, technology is not going anywhere, and it only continues to advance. It’s part of us now, part of our lives and part of the fabric of our reality. The only solution is to start making and using tech that brings us closer to our natural selves — and that’s precisely what our mission is all about at Neurosity.
We want to create a world where we can all flourish, even with all the flaws and friction we encounter.