the biannual family staycay

This year, milestones didn’t arrive one by one. They arrived all at once, packed into a family staycation with over twenty-five of us, spanning ages one to eighty. Different generations, different stages of life, all under one roof. Loud, chaotic, warm in the way only family can be.

We went away together, something we’ve started to do every other year, and it’s slowly become a tradition without anyone formally naming it as one. A pause in the calendar where life slows down just enough for us to celebrate us.

We celebrated Diwali, lights and colour and togetherness, but we also celebrated the quieter milestones of the year. First birthdays. Fortieths. Sixtieths. Seventieths. Eightieths. Moments that mark how far we’ve come, and how much life has unfolded in between.

There was something grounding about seeing all those ages side by side. Watching a one-year-old take in the world while an eighty-year-old reflects on a lifetime of memories. It put everything into perspective. Time felt less linear and more shared.

These celebrations weren’t about grand gestures or perfectly planned moments. They were about presence. About being able to sit together, eat together, laugh together, and acknowledge the passing of time without fear. Just gratitude.

I felt deeply aware of how lucky we are to still have these moments. To still have each other. To be able to gather generations together and celebrate life while everyone is here to be celebrated.

Not everyone gets this. Not everyone gets to mark milestones like this, in full rooms, with overlapping conversations and shared history. And that awareness makes it feel even more precious.

I’m grateful that this has become our rhythm. Every other year, stepping away from routine to honour the years we’ve lived, the ones we’re entering, and the fact that we get to do it together.

the same person

You hear it in the phrases we use, the jokes we repeat, the quotes we casually drop into conversation as if they’re original thoughts. You see it in the way people dress, the colours, the silhouettes, the aesthetics that cycle through everyone at once. It’s subtle, but it’s there. Like we’re all pulling from the same shared reference sheet.

Is starting to to feel like we’re becoming versions of the same person.

We often blame the algorithm for this. We talk about it like it’s some ominous force shaping our tastes and identities. But what actually is an algorithm? At its core, it’s a recommendation system. It shows us things it thinks we’ll like based on what we’ve already engaged with. In that sense, it’s not so different from a friend saying, “You’d love this,” or “This reminded me of you.”

And that’s where it gets complicated.

Because so much of what we’ve ever loved has been recommended to us by someone else. Music passed down by siblings. Books lent by friends. Films suggested late at night. Even personal style has always been influenced by what we see around us. None of us have ever been entirely self-made in our tastes.

So what is really different now.

The difference is scale, speed, and sameness.

Recommendations used to be personal, contextual, shaped by intimacy. Now they’re mass-produced. Thousands, sometimes millions of people are being shown the same things at the same time, framed in the same way, praised using the same language. Taste no longer trickles, it floods.

When enough people are recommended the same things, individuality starts to blur. Not because people lack originality, but because the pool we’re all drawing from has narrowed. We’re all discovering things simultaneously, reacting in similar ways, internalising the same references.

We don’t know where our genuine preferences end and where repetition begins. We don’t know if we like something because it resonates with us, or because we’ve seen it enough times to feel familiar. Exposure turns into affection. Familiarity turns into identity.

There’s comfort in shared language. Connection in mutual references. A sense of belonging that comes from knowing someone else understands the same joke, the same feeling, the same aesthetic. The internet hasn’t just flattened us, it’s also linked us.

The tension lives in that in-between space.

We want to feel unique, but we also want to feel understood. We criticise sameness while participating in it. We long for originality while relying on recommendations to guide us toward what feels safe, validated, already loved.

Maybe the issue isn’t that the internet has turned us into the same person. Maybe it’s that we haven’t yet learned how to sit comfortably with influence without losing ourselves to it.

The question isn’t whether recommendations are bad.
It’s when they stop being suggestions and start becoming instructions.

And maybe the work now is learning how to notice the difference.