The Environment Is Rewriting You | Social Media, AI, Identity & Belief Formation

In this episode of The Voyage Cast, Eddie Eccker explores how social media algorithms, AI, and digital culture are quietly reshaping the way people form beliefs, identity, and relationships.

Drawing from real clinical observations inside the counseling office, Eddie discusses why modern belief systems are forming faster than ever, why many people are beginning to sound psychologically and culturally similar, and how constant algorithmic reinforcement can slowly narrow perspective without people realizing it.

This episode explores:
 • How social media and AI influence belief formation
 • Why repetition starts feeling like truth
 • The psychological shift from beliefs to identity
 • Why disagreement now feels personal
 • The impact on marriages, families, and generational relationships
 • The dangers of using AI purely for emotional validation
 • Why real relationships challenge us in ways algorithms never will
 • How pursuing truth and tolerating challenge may be essential for emotional maturity

This is not an anti-technology episode. It is a discussion about awareness, influence, identity development, and the psychological cost of living in systems designed to reflect us back to ourselves.

If you’ve noticed growing division in families, increasing fragility in relationships, or the feeling that people are losing the ability to genuinely wrestle with ideas, this episode is for you.

If you want even more, check out the article The Environment is Rewriting US

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Voyage Cast. I put probably a little too much thought into some of the things I bring forward to you. But hopefully, this is helpful beyond the amount of this, right? Hopefully, this is something that you can use in your everyday life, or at least as you develop greater insight and understanding about the world around you can help you think. And I'm pretty sure it is the topic we're going to talk about today. Um, and I'm pretty sure it's gonna be useful uh for everybody listening to this. And let's be honest, you probably need to hear this too. And whether you're a young person or a parent having kids like I am, or you're older, you need to understand this. So, anyways, I'm Ed, your host, as always, and here's what's been bothering me. People aren't just struggling with what they believe necessarily anymore. They're struggling, and it's kind of subconscious, they're struggling in how those beliefs are getting formed in their minds and informed in their hearts in the first place. And so I wanted to record this today because I've been thinking about it for a long time, and I'm just seeing this particular issue weirdly come up in my office more and more. And it's becoming detrimental, I think, in families, and I think it's becoming detrimental in couples. Um, and it takes like extra steps to kind of unwind beliefs before we can even get to connection, which uh I think for a lot of people is really frustrating, of course. Um, but it's also additional steps as a therapist before I can kind of get to the meat and potatoes of the whole thing. I have to get through all this kind of background structure first. And so I'm starting to see this clients are forming their beliefs way too fast. It's like instant belief systems are being developed, uh, which to be fair, would be great if all these ideas were like really good ideas or really good belief systems. And I don't mean they're always wrong either, by the way, and I don't mean they're irrational necessarily. It's more like they're getting formed probably quicker than they should be, and then locked in before they've really had any time to think them through. Um, and what's been catching my attention is primarily this. A lot of those beliefs sound really similar. So it's kind of like the pattern recognition has been catching my attention. The beliefs are starting to sound really similar, but they're coming from different people, they're coming from people with different backgrounds. But the language or the conclusions that people are using and coming to, those are close enough, pretty much, that you can tell they didn't come kind of on their own. They're sort of a talking point almost. And it's almost like everyone's reading from a slightly different version of the same script. And again, that doesn't make the beliefs or ideas false. Okay. Some of them have truth in them, and that's fine. Uh, but what stands out is how they're being formed. It's like the thought is showing up in their head like already installed, like complete thought, boom, downloaded, done, no time thought about it, just in. Um, it's not something that somebody slowly worked through. It's more like they've heard it enough times through repetition, and it just feels true because they've heard it enough. Okay. Um, and and if I'm being honest, I don't think it's just happening to my clients. I I use these, you know, I use all these same tools that everybody else is using to get this information. So I'm pretty sure I've been experiencing some of these things. I'm pretty sure uh my family, uh, friends, anybody you know has been experiencing these things because we're all using the same tools. We're all on our phones, we're all in social media, we're all using AI, we're all using, we're all in the same kind of pool, our environment. And I can see how easily it is to hear things a few times and see it again somewhere else, and see it again somewhere else. And before long, it just feels like it's your own thought, it's your own belief system now. Uh repetition is starting to feel like good reasoning in a sense, which is efficient in some way, but not exactly how our process of thinking or formulating ideas should really work. And there's something else I've noticed too that I think it maybe this is anecdotal, but I think it's true because it keeps showing up. Um, it's like our sense of community doesn't feel local anymore. It used to be shaped by our community, our friends, our neighbors, local relatives, things like that, day-to-day experiences, all that. Now our sense of community or our sense of maybe community identity is starting to feel a little bit more global. Like as an example, the other day, I caught my son uh using an Australian idiom or slang in a sentence. And it caught me for a second. I'm like, dude, what are you what are you saying? What is that? And he just described that he heard it from friends online. And so growing up for him, like the slang he's using is sort of global. Whereas growing up for me, the only slang I knew came from my small little town, and maybe whatever made it through on a fuzzy TV. You know, like that the channels I had were limited, the exposure I had was limited. And the only Australian exposure I had was crocodile dundee and some traveling basketball team that made it to our high school randomly, which is surprising. We don't, we're not a big school uh one year when I was, I think, maybe 17 or 18. And that's it. That's all the exposure I ever had. Crocodile Dundee, basketball team. That's it. So, but now language and culture, even identity, it's coming from everywhere all at once. And that might not be a bad thing necessarily. There is value in exposure, but it does really change something. You know, we used to grow up somewhere, and now we grow up from everywhere. And so it's kind of putting a weird challenge to identity develop, I think. Uh, and when you put those pieces together, I think you're gonna start seeing, maybe you see what I see, kind of a bigger shift. People aren't just exposed to ideas generally. They're in systems that pick up on what they respond to and just keep feeding it back to them. It's not like a random thing, it's just really efficient now because of the way social media and these algorithms work. It just feeds back. Uh so over time, what you s what you see starts to kind of narrow. It's weird to say this. It's like you have this kind of global sense or global reach, but what you believe becomes so super narrow. Uh, not because you know someone's forcing it on you or anything like that, uh, which would almost be easier to deal with because you could identify where that message is coming from, but it's because you're being shown more of what you already lean toward. And what's familiar starts to just feel true. Even if it's not, it's just familiar. You know it. It's the devil you know, so to speak. Uh, but it's not just the repetition, right? Things don't just feel true because they've been repeated. They feel true because they affirm what we already want to believe. Keep that in mind. It's something we want to believe, and those algorithms affirm it. The global community of options affirms it given the reach, which means we're not just being influenced, we're participating in it in some real sense because we're engaging in these tools. And I think this is the part um where people maybe underestimate uh because none of this feels like influence when it's happening. It it doesn't feel like you're being shaped by a community online or or these algorithms or whatever. But when you're when you're not noticing it, whatever you're being fed just feels right. Right? Things seem to explain what you've already been experiencing. Uh, and that's what makes it really so effective. Because it's not really challenging you to believe something differently, it's just affirming what you already think, what you already believe. Um you see, because the more something lines up with how you already see the world, the less likely you are to question it, right? If you already have a preconceived bias or notion of what you think things should be like, and then you're just constantly being affirmed by your own mirror, which is sort of what the algorithms do, there's no sense to question it because it just adds up. It just makes sense. See, I found the evidence, I found this, I found this. And over time, uh something really subtle starts to happen. Um, what you see begins to narrow, and what you consider to be other information or whatever, what you think about uh begins to narrow. What you're willing to engage with actually becomes begins to narrow and it becomes more of an echo chamber of ideas and thoughts. And it's not really super obvious. You don't notice it right away. It could, it could be three days and you're already kind of caught up in something. Uh it's very quiet, it's very gradual. Uh you and you don't lose any kind of perspective like all at once. You know, you sl you lose it sort of slowly by only seeing one version of things. And I find this very common that my clients will come in and they only are seeing one version of things. And that does not work when you're looking at a relationship with somebody else who sees different versions of things. And the problem isn't just what you're seeing necessarily, it's what you're no longer seeing. The ideas you stop considering, the perspectives you stop being exposed to, the questions you stop asking, you stop really engaging in things that matter, you stop thinking. And this is where the shift starts moving from information to kind of identity. Because when most of what you're being exposed to it reinforces what you already think, right? It starts to feel less like uh something you believe and it starts feeling more like something you just are. And once it gets to that point, uh, it becomes really much harder to question. Because now, if something challenges that idea, it doesn't just feel like it's a disagreement of the idea. It feels like it's a disagreement with all of you, with your entire personality, with who you are as an identity. And by the time this shows up in your relationships, uh, it doesn't feel like influence. Now, listen, it feels like clarity. It actually feels uh like certainty. It feels like you're just seeing things for what they really are finally. And that's where things actually start kind of break down a little bit because you're not just holding on to some kind of idea. You're really protecting yourself. You're defending yourself. You're organizing your interactions and everything you do in your life around this new belief, thought process that's now become identity. Everything is around that. And most people do not realize this is happening because it feels like they've just finally figured things out. They finally found out who they are. Uh, and this actually starts to matter clinically in ways that are easy to miss. And, you know, I've been mentioning that I see this in my office because it doesn't just stay internal, it shows up in how people relate, especially in families and especially across generations, you start to see those odd barriers form where it's not just disagreement anymore. It's like people can't even uh get to the point of understanding each other. And part of what's happening is this we're losing the ability to sit with an idea long enough to just wrestle with it. And if if it's if it's your partner or your or your parents' idea or your child's idea, where you're losing the ability to just listen, to ask honest questions without being without somebody be getting defensive, to let something challenge us without immediately reacting to it. And it starts to feel like if an idea pushes against you, it's a threat to your identity, not just to your opinion, but to who you are as a human being. And you can, I could I I'm hoping I'm painting the picture well enough for you to understand how this can play out in a relationship. You know, if somebody has such an ingrained ideas and those ideas have now become their bel beyond their beliefs, it's become their identity, it's almost impossible to connect. Especially if you disagree. And somewhere along the way, we started to treat disagreement like it's some kind of attack. Instead of just part of the process of figuring things out, just understanding life, just figuring out life. But if beliefs are forming so quickly and they're not being tested, then there's nothing in place to absorb that kind of tension. So instead of listening, learning, understanding, people just go straight to defend. They shut down, they push back, they disengage, they scream and yell, you're attacking me. Which, if you've ever tried to have a family conversation recently, you may have felt this. And especially with adolescents, like that's it's kind of normal with adolescents that they might feel this a little bit more, but I'm seeing it more and more with even adults. It's normal with adolescents because mainly they're developing their identity, sort of in that formation stage. Um and another thing that's not helping with that formation stage is the advent of uh AI. And this is where things move like a whole nother step. Because now it's not just content being fed to you by just the basic algorithms that we've all been kind of dealing with. Now this is something that actually just talks back to you. And don't get me wrong, I use AI all the time to work out stuff. Uh I'm not trying to downplay any tool on the internet or any of these things. Okay. Um and I probably use it more than I should sometimes, if I'm being really honest, for ideas, writing, thinking, things through, all that kind of stuff. And it's so helpful. It's incredibly helpful, which is a part of why it's so easy, I think, to miss the other, the dark side of what it's doing. And you're even starting to see the kind of information come out in the psychological world, um, uh as evidenced by the American Psychological Association putting out a health advisory recently on this. Uh, and the takeaway wasn't that AI is bad. It was a little bit more specific than that. And it's not saying don't use these tools, but it is saying don't use these tools as replacement for therapy. Sure, these tools can be helpful, but they're not a substitute for real trained clinicians because we don't have strong evidence, of course, uh yet that they're safe or effective as treatment on their own. So there is some research, let's be fair-minded, that needs to happen if it was to be a replacement for therapy. I don't think it's a good idea. Uh, and I think most of my listeners would agree that's probably a bad idea, uh, especially for long-term use, uh and especially with more vulnerable populations. Uh, and to be to be fair, like that they're not talking about every use of AI. Uh they weren't talking about tools clinicians use behind the scenes or people just use in business or marketing or whatever. They're talking about people using AI as their primary source of emotional support. And there's a bias worth acknowledging there too. They're a professional organization, so of course they're going to emphasize the role of a trained provider like myself, uh, but that doesn't mean the concern is wrong. And I've seen both sides of this in my office. I've had clients use AI in such helpful ways to organize their thoughts, to put language to something they couldn't quite get across, to slow themselves down even before reacting, just kind of think through things. And that's so useful. I've even seen people use it in a medical capacity, which I'm not advocating for anything here, but I've seen it and I've seen it to be really life-changing. Um, and I've also seen, unfortunately, the other side of things, where it becomes so something that mostly reflects uh what you already want to hear. I've seen it with couples where they'll put in their information about their spouse, and then they then the AI just spits back kind of everything they want to hear without accounting for the broader dynamics of what's going on. It can't know that. Uh, and so that's very complicated. And so it can it can even hurt relationships. It doesn't help to expand or develop thinking necessarily. It can work in an unintentionally subversive way to just reinforce what you already believe or the biases you already have. So a helpful tool does not mean it's a harmless tool, okay? Especially when it starts replacing real interactions. And I think this is kind of that tension area, because the tool itself isn't really the problem, just like a hammer isn't a problem. It's more the issue of how it's being used on the job site. Whether it's helpful for you to think more clearly, like in the way that I might use it, uh, or just helpful for you to feel more certain about your own ideas or beliefs. And that's not always a good thing. Uh and real relationships, frankly, don't work like this. Real relationships rub you the wrong way. They push back, they misunderstand you. Uh and they require you to clarify your thoughts, your feelings, uh, your beliefs. Um AI doesn't do that. It just adjusts to you and it reflects you back. And if you're not paying any attention, uh, it can start to just feel like straight validation of whatever it is you think, feel, and believe. So now it's reinforcing whatever packets of information you've started to believe. And being reflected is starting to feel uh like being right, which is not the same thing. And to be clear, this isn't an argument that uh technology is bad. Okay, that's not that's not what I'm advocating for. It isn't bad. These are tools, but they are powerful tools, and we need to respect that. They can educate us, they can clarify, they can expand access in ways that we couldn't have imagined before. I was stoked when I was a kid about the Dick Tracy watch. If you're old enough to know what Dick Tracy is, it was like a kind of smartwatch back in the old days. He was a detective, whatever. When I got the Apple Watch as an adult, I'm like, holy cow, the Dick Tracy watch for the first time in real life. I can make calls from it. This is amazing. But this is different, the technology that we're dealing with. It's not just like, hey, I can call from my watch. This is a kind of technology that's so powerful that it it shapes our belief systems. It influences our thinking about the people in our lives. It shapes things before we've had time to fully vet out what it is we're thinking about. And we're not even we're barely aware of it. Which can make us unstable. And we have no idea why. And this is where things I think get a little bit uncomfortable because it's easy to think, you know, some other person is influenced by this stuff. But it's harder to admit that we all are influenced by these things, including me, including you, including everybody you know. And I'd love to tell you here that I'm the exception to this rule. I'm not. So the question becomes what actually helps? Like what how do we change the course? Not at like a surface level, but a structural level. And this is usually the part where people want a quick fix. And I don't have one. You ever have somebody selling you one? It's probably snake oil, so try not to listen to that. Okay. Part of the fix is this is rebuilding what we'll call internal anchors. Okay. These are your values you actually choose and stick to, which may sound simple until you try to do it consistently. But part of getting better is learning to pursue what's actually true and being willing to let your ideas about truth be challenged all along the way. Because your ideas about truth are not your identity. And because if everything you believe has to stay comfortable, it's probably not being tested. And if you have to protect those beliefs, something's wrong. If you can't challenge your belief systems, if you can't challenge your ideas, something's wrong. Part of helping yourself is creating space away from constant input. Not eliminating it totally, because we're in a modern world and we need to learn and we need to stay maybe uh on top of certain topics or things for our jobs or whatever's going on in our community. But we need to be more intentional about what we let in and what's shaping us, what's forming our identity if we let it, but what's forming it? And part of it is getting back into real-world interactions, which is going to sound for some like a strange and foreign concept. It's like some of the clients I talk to about dating, they're like, don't use the apps. You know, I recommend don't using the apps. And they're like, well, where do I find people? I'm like, well, go do interesting things. That's where other interesting people might be. You know, that's a good start, anyways. It's where things are, you know, no longer filtered or optimized. You know, where feedback is not curated, but it's just genuine feedback from some other, you know, person in front of you. Someone that's just as dysfunctional in this world as you are, someone that's just as confused about life as you are. And we work it out together. And it's in that working it out together through. Real time through real things that we develop our relationships which help form our identity. And that's so much more powerful because it's it's rubbing up against our ideas in real time, and we have to wrestle through things. And this can be so uncomfortable. Because at the end of the day, we're not just dealing with louder voices anymore. We're dealing with an environment that's learning how we think. This this kind of algorithmic world that we live in. If we go in the real world, people learn who we are, but they still rub against us, they still push us. That causes maturity. Okay, but if we stay in this online AI algorithmic-based world, this thing just learns about us and it feeds ourselves back to us. And if we're not careful, we're gonna start to confuse what we see often for what isn't true, and for what feels right, for what actually holds up, and what reflects us, for what actually challenges us to grow the hell up. And that's where people start to lose access to themselves. They don't do it all at once, okay? But slowly enough, these algorithmic influences we'll call them, just start to feel normal. So be warned, this is happening to everybody. This is happening to you, and it's happening to me, and it's not going away. These influences that that shape us, that form us. As I tell people sometimes, I don't care what your beliefs are, pursue truth. Because it is my sincere belief that in pursuing truth, especially in relationships, we're gonna pursue genuine knowing. The knowing about somebody in such a way that brings intimacy, that brings a fulfilling connection from somebody that you've committed your life to, especially in a marital sense. In a friendship community, it brings true and honest vulnerability, but not in a curated sense where you're protecting your identity. You have to just be yourself and take the risk. I've taken the risk personally in my life to be known, and I've been fired by friends and clients and all kinds of people over the years, because I'm not going to be everybody's brand, and that's perfectly fine. But it's honest, you know? And that's the risk of being known genuinely for who you are to the degree that you understand it now. Not for who you are, and this is just who I am, and you plateau, and that's it. But just for who I am now. Recognizing that there's so much more to grow in. Alright, that's all I have for you today. I hope that's useful. I hope that is thought-provoking for you to consider the things that are actually forming our minds subconsciously. I know there's a lot out there on this, but we need, if nothing else, the repetition of a different kind. We need the repetition that these algorithms, that these social media, the internet, AI, especially AI right now, is pre-packaging ideas to us. It's feeding us, ourselves in so many ways. Now there are ways to work with AI to get around some of this. And you have to be savvy and shrewd when using these things. But if you're not careful, it will form you in such a way that you'll become actually more fragile. Because you'll have no strength on the rub of real life, the rub of real relationship. You'll just have everything reinforced, and that's just your identity. And that makes you makes you fragile. If somebody challenges a belief, you crumble. There's no way to live. You know, you're not done in this life. You're you're not done developing. Don't stake your entire identity on what you think you know right now. That's not even close to who you are. It's not even close to worth it either. I'm gonna leave you guys with that. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the VoyageCast. I do, like I said, I hope this is helpful. I think you need this. I need to be reminded of these things all the time. If you like this kind of content, please like, subscribe, do all the things to help that algorithm that we're talking about promote this kind of content over the other stuff that maybe just reinforces the things you want to think about or just affirm, you know, crazy ideas. Um, so let people know and tune in for new episodes as I have more things coming. But as it is, I know it's slow going, guys. I for those of you that listen regularly, I know it's slow going. I do have a real business to run and real clients to see. So I try to get this stuff out as much as I can, and I'll continue doing it. So stay tuned for more. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.