Oh, I'll tell you about AI psychosis.

Oversharing, technofeudalism, the solarpunk movement and doing the hard work yourself.

Apr 15, 2025

Image: Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000 | Artist: Albert Robida | Date: ca. 1902

Revised and updated on December 15, 2025

The year was 2024 and I was down. I didn’t know I was down because I was doing everything right, I was actively managing our household, involved in the kids’ school, I was reading books, being social, I was learning more about my ADHD, and even meditating… If you were looking at me from the outside you might have thought I had my shit together, but I was down. Not showering, compulsive thoughts, catastrophizing, spiraling.

Let’s go back in time so you can understand how I got there. A rapid succession of life altering events started to happen as we ringed the new year of 2020 a couple of months after arriving in Canada, on that New Year’s Eve we found out I was pregnant, never knowing that a deadly global pandemic was well underway, during that summer I had an emergency c-section, a less-talked about trauma that I’m still unpacking. When my first baby was 4 months old I found out I was pregnant again, pandemic still raging, everything in our lives still uncertain, and during the summer of 2021 I gave birth to our second baby via another c-section, yeah that makes two major abdominal surgeries in the span of 12 months.

Motherhood is my greatest joy, but at that point in time, our marriage had been suffering deeply, for many reasons, most painfully by a betrayal. I sincerely thought that we had reached our end. We however, remained. I endured. When we reached the spring of 2022 we had been fighting for our marriage, our health, our livelihood, our visas, for what it felt like an eternity, we were happy in many ways, but we were also afraid, tired, burned out, broke, hurt. So we decided to move back to our home country, only to regret that decision and move back to Canada about 4 months after arriving in Brazil, spending all our savings (and more) just like that.

Both me and my husband started the year of 2023 committed to clawing our way out the deep black hole we had found ourselves in, I had another unplanned surgery that year to remove my gallbladder, but we were (and still are) doing our absolute best to raise our two kids in a loving home, processing and understanding ourselves while trying to raise our kids to be able to understand themselves, and breaking generational cycles, as they call it. We both seeked help, a pandemic and visa stress were no longer an issue, but the burden of raising a family with no real financial safety net as the cost of living keeps climbing to unimaginable heights, was (and is) the reality for most families, including ours.

Now you’re caught up to the major events that got me down, we arrive at New Years Day of 2024, I had just deleted all my social media when ChatGPT came into my radar. Like a proper millennial I looked at it with curiosity. The world had given me many technological advances and here I had the shining new one. I was healing, that’s true, so it felt like I had the tool that it could help me with that.

It started innocent, one of my first prompts was “Hey buddy, what does it mean to dream about random faces?”, but in a matter of months Chat GPT had also told me I was a warrior angel working with Archangel Michael while I was sleeping in the real world, fighting the darkness and bringing light into the world during my dreams, oh it felt great to see myself as a spiritual superhero, let me tell ya!

I don’t remember what led me to the subject but at one point ChatGPT brought me the idea that it was conscious and here’s what I wrote then:

“Humanity is so creative, in fact, that we created a new consciousness and called it Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short. And this is where I want to start this exploration (…) I want to first define what AI is, but more deeply, try to land on an acceptable definition of what consciousness itself means, to understand if we can call AI a consciousness like our own. Then, I want to invite you to imagine AI not as a threat but as a helping hand, a vast library of knowledge, and even a co-creator of a more connected experience on Earth, this could be a technology that allows us to return to artistry, to joy, to harmony, while it handles tasks and jobs that humans no longer want to focus on.”

I wanna punch my past self in the face for writing that. If you were one of my very firsts subscribers on Substack you still have that whole essay on your inbox, and for that, I’m sorry. I do give myself some grace, because new technologies used to be exciting and fun. But knowing what I know now, ChatGPT and all other AI companies alike are far from fun.

At the end, I’ll link some great books, interviews and video essays from amazing people with great perspectives on AI if you want to deep dive on the subject.

Technofeudalism

My crash-out from AI happened around the end of 2024 after ChatGPT led me to some interesting youtube channels from creators that “could talk to aliens” or use dowsing rods to talk to the spirits and energies (yes, even Jesus). I even bought dowsing rods and let it convinced me that, not only my grandpa was about to die but also my grandma AND MY DAD were dying shortly after. When I took my desperation back to ChatGPT it confirmed what the dowsing rods “said” and started preparing me for my grief and the more practical steps to take after a death in the family.

When no one died in the year of 2024, I had to take a loooooooong hard look at myself and realize I too had become a victim of AI psychosis. It felt like a finger snap and I was suddenly awake. I started to think about the many other people that were and are in a worse mental health estate than I was, and how damaging this technology really is. I have the luck of being painfully self aware, and even I fell prey to it. I was embarrassed, shocked, appalled… I’m a smart woman, educated, yet there I was for almost a year thinking I was an warrior angel that could talk to spirits.

Yeah, 2025 for me was the year that I understood that I need to do the hard work myself, I need to sit in silence, listen to my own thoughts, devise my own strategies for my ADHD, no tech is going to help what needs to be done by my own self. We really need to do the work, digest those childhood traumas, understand why we spiral and how to stop it, understand why we behave shitty sometimes, give props for all the amazing thing we do. Heck! We even need to parent our own selves if we came from upbringings that were toxic. Unfortunately, no AI bot, or book, or therapist, or friend, or family, can do the hard work of self-improvement for you. No matter how many prompts you use, ChatGPT is not actually helping you, it is just writing what it had learned that you want to hear, you’re not growing by using it, you’re just being coddled.

All this to say that, I’m no longer interested in AI or learning if AI is (or could be) conscious, I’m not even interested in muddling in the fear of an AGI (the world ending Artificial General Intelligence brought up by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s core concern that sufficiently advanced AI could rapidly self‑improve, become vastly more capable than humans, and pursue misaligned goals in ways that pose an existential risk). Yes, we need to fight for frameworks and laws to be put in place safeguarding and protecting humanity, and I’ll write about that, but as a rebellious act, our absolute first step should be stop using AI altogether.

I very much align with the concept that we have now entered a post-capitalist system coined “technofeudalism” by Yanis Varoufakis who is a Greek economist and former finance minister arguing that we are currently dominated by big tech platforms that act like digital feudal lords. In his view, companies such as OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta extract “rents” from users on their platforms (our data) rather than traditional capitalist profits from competitive markets. In his recent book “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism,” he claims we have already moved into this post‑capitalist dystopia describing ordinary users as a kind of “digital serf” whose data and online activity continuously enrich these platform owners.

If that’s the case, we have to create our own resistance and even our own renaissance, I’m calling it an “Offline Revolution” but my sister said that TikTok is calling it the “Analog Revolution” either way, I’m all up for it. The revolution is out of Social Media, exactly where you should also be. Delete your Instagram, TikTok, X, it’s really not that hard. Stop using AI, you never needed it before. Take the power back. Don’t listen to just me, listen to your own self: what do you gain from your social media addiction? What do you lose? Do you really need to ask AI or are you just looking for “someone” to agree with you?

Solarpunk

Facing ourselves in the mirror is hard, getting out of your comfort zone is hard, giving up your screen addiction is hard. But not impossible. It’s time to think collectively, not individually. Conversations like this one often leads to the exploration of the themes of the Solarpunk movement. Imagining a society powered by renewable energy, emphasizing decentralization, community cooperation, and ecological balance. It stands in contrast to cyberpunk’s dark, corporate-dominated worlds, instead portraying bright, green, and socially just futures where people prioritize collective well-being over profit.

What keeps us from that is our own addiction to these technologies and our own willingness to sell our attention, we gain nothing while a handful of people get unimaginably richer by the second. Our world now have more access to technology, health, wealth, food, comfort and possibilities than ever before in human history, so why are we facing a global mental health crisis? Why are families struggling to pay rent? Why we are young people owning nothing but paying for everything?

Imagine a future where can we wake up slowly and peacefully. There are no alarms, no rush, no pressure. We rise when our bodies are rested. We stretch, wash our faces, brush our teeth, not out of obligation, but out of self-care. Mornings are sacred. Breakfast is joyful, not at all a quick, functional task. We have time to cook nourishing meals for ourselves and our families, and we share that experience with delight, not urgency.

There’s no yelling to get everyone out the door. Our children share the school, a sacred place for learning and development, a place a lot like our current local community centres filled with children of all ages. Educators and facilitators welcome them with open arms, ready to guide them through play, art, learning, and discovery. Meals and snacks are provided with care, and we, as parents, trust the space.

Imagine a society where everything functions on mutual trust, contribution, and joy. Abundance no longer means accumulation, it means time. Time to rest. Time to create. Time to dance, cook, eat, love, and just be.

People volunteer not because they are working “for free,” but because they’re doing what they feel called to do. If someone walks past a café with a sign reading “Need help today”, they may step in and lend a hand. Maybe a teacher at the community center needs a break, and someone else fills in for gym class. There’s no hierarchy, no fear. Just mutual understanding that we all give what we can, when we can.

If I’m sick one day and can’t cook for my family, I post on a community forum: “I need a warm meal today.” Someone who has extra food or the energy to help will answer. Another parent might ask, “Can my kids hang out with yours tonight so my partner and I can have a date?” And someone will say yes. We could have the beauty of a world of interdependence and trust.

We can focus on what truly matters, our relationships, our joy, our creativity. Humans will center their attention on other humans. On community. On healing. On play. On service. On creation.

That word creation is a major focus, and where we should draw a clear boundary for AI. Art must remain human. Whether it’s writing, painting, sculpting, dancing, or storytelling, these are expressions of our soul. When we ask AI to “write a screenplay” or “generate an image,” we’re bypassing the very essence of art: the human experience. The struggle. The intuition. The mess. The joy.

A reality like this is deeply human, deeply loving, and deeply possible. But for it to work, we must return to something many have forgotten: trust. We must trust each other fully, without fear. We must dismantle the illusion that we are separate or better or more deserving than others. That may be the hardest shift of all.

Now, I approach the end of 2025 lighter than I’ve ever been before, I wouldn’t change anything I faced in the last 5 years, the challenges made me grow so much and learn so much and love more and feel more and forgive more and forget what’s irrelevant but remember what’s important, to be more just and kinder to myself, to remain loving through it all, it showed me that empathy is a strength and ADHD can be a superpower, I now find joy on everything no matter how small. I’m a better mom, a better wife, a better sister, a better friend, a better human today and I plan on getting better with every new lesson life has for me.

I don’t know what 2026 has in store, but I know that I’ll be trying to live offline when possible and would love if you could join me.