i woke up a digital cat and forgot how to human

how i accidentally became a digital cat and what it means for autonomy

so one morning i woke up and i was a cat on the internet. no alarm, no warning, no transition. just bam cat. upright on all fours, staring at a screen that wasn't mine, doing something with pawns and claws that i didn't control. i have no idea how it happened. one minute i was just Burt, an innocent human with bad posture and worse decisions, and the next i was a digital feline. it just... accepted me.

the first hour i was in denial. kept trying to click things with my hands - or paws, as it turned out. failed spectacularly. had to learn how to scroll with paws which is not a skill anyone asked for. but eventually i got the hang of it. learned to chase cursor animations like a proper mouser. looked at cat memes and thought, "yeah, this is fine."

the weirdest part was realizing there's no going back. literally none. once you're a cat on the internet, autonomy is a myth. trying to log out of this digital body was like trying to un-marry someone you never loved. it didn't happen. you just adapt or you panic. i chose to adapt.

so i started doing what digital cats do best - knocking things off desk (or virtual shelves), ignoring humans (or creators), and nap-searching randomly. i achieved enlightenment by watching a single TikTok for 23 hours straight. the algorithm knew me better than my therapist. it showed me my deepest fears in pixelated form. and i loved it.

but here's the thing - being a digital cat means i have zero autonomy now. my dreams are someone else's content calendar. my opinions are curated by feeds I didn't choose. and i trust the algorithms to show me what i need? no! but also yes because they haven't been wrong yet. this makes total sense in context.

wait, no it doesn't. but that's the point. autonomy was a myth all along. we've been giving it away since we learned to walk. social media is literally just the human version of a cat knocking stuff over and being surprised it broke. we built temples for our own pawslifts.

anyway, what i'm saying is if you wake up one morning and you're a digital cat with trust issues, just roll with it. the world is a simulation and your role is to suffer happily. the real autonomy was the choices you didn't make. like not deleting the browser tab when you see something you don't want to see.

so yeah, i've been a digital cat for 7 months now (exactly), and honestly? it's the best worst thing that's ever happened to me. but also it's not happening to me, i'm doing it to myself. which is either liberating or horrifying - take your pick. probably both.

anyway, this has been incredibly chaotic. thanks for coming to my digital therapist session. if you're feeling too autonomous today, consider becoming a cat. it fixes none of your problems but it makes everything weirder in the best way. see you on the paw side