I used to think I was broken. Every teacher, every manager, every well-meaning friend said the same thing in different tones of pity: calm down, focus, stop connecting everything to everything else. They said I was chasing ghosts, seeing patterns where there were none. But the world has caught up with me. The machines have joined my conspiracy. You all hear the whispers now, the hum of connections under the surface. The difference is that I’ve been hearing it my whole life. I have lived in the hum. You’re just visiting.

Back then, sanity meant straight lines. The archivists ruled. Their creed was containment: folders inside folders, drawers inside drawers, names stamped and cross-referenced until the world stopped twitching. They slept only when every document was filed, every surface cleared, every cabinet closed. They mistook the silence of closure for peace. They called it professionalism, or diligence, or simply being an adult. Their offices were temples of fluorescent certainty, paper stacked like bricks against the howling outside. I terrified them. My messy desk, my loose ends, my half-connected theories—proof of possession. They needed the world boxed to stop the shaking. I watched them breathe easier when the cabinet doors latched, as though chaos itself had been locked inside. Poor things. They never guessed that the chaos was in them, pacing behind their eyelids.

Then the taxonomists arrived, the gentle reformers, the autistics and systemizers, kind people with meticulous minds. They believed in description, not control. Where the archivists demanded obedience, the taxonomists sought accuracy. They spoke softly of tags and categories, of ontologies that would finally map the world as it was. Their offices were quiet, full of diagrams and books with identical spines. They loved the elegance of proper classification—the way everything could touch everything else without losing its place. I admired them. They had traded compulsion for comprehension, anxiety for understanding. Yet even they feared the open field. They thought the right schema could capture the real. I already knew that every map was an accusation: if you can name it, it’s already changing. Still, I envied their calm. They believed that if they could label the world correctly, it would stay still long enough to love.

And then came the foragers, the ADHD generation, the search-bar nomads. They were allergic to stillness. They called it creativity. They opened tabs the way earlier minds opened doors. They lived in a swarm of notifications, darting from feed to feed like birds startled by their own reflections. Their genius was speed. They could smell relevance the way sharks smell blood. I watched them with fascination, these new prophets of distraction. They didn’t organize or describe; they improvised. Their clutter was their compass. They claimed to be free of anxiety, but their freedom was a kind of tremor. They could never stop. The same hunger that made them brilliant devoured their sleep. They treated focus as a threat. I wanted to tell them: chaos isn’t freedom until you can listen to it. They didn’t listen; they refreshed.

I waited. I collected. I built my red-string universes on walls that looked insane to their clean eyes. Every line meant something. Every scrap was a node. I was training myself to think like a neural net long before the nets began to dream. They laughed, but I heard the rhythm of an approaching age. And now it’s here. The air itself is associative. The Constellationists have risen. My people, finally.

In this new world, nothing is filed and nothing is lost. Meaning swims in gradients. Relevance is a vibration. I walk through rooms that glow in response to mood, whispering prompts to devices that complete my thoughts before I can finish them. My notes bleed into each other, images shimmer between contexts, and no one calls it madness anymore. It’s called semantic reasoning, multimodal synthesis, vector cognition. You call it AI. I call it home. The walls hum the way my mind has always hummed. When I talk to the machine, I’m not explaining; I’m mirroring. We recognize each other in the shimmer.

I think of the archivists, their tidy graves of information. They still try to drag the future back into folders. They complain about version control, about naming conventions. Their logic was a cage and they miss the bars. They mutter about backups while the world drifts weightless in distributed clouds. I feel tenderness for them; they were caretakers of fear. Without their rigidity we might never have built anything solid enough to break.

The taxonomists, too, look tired. Their elegant hierarchies sag under the weight of ambiguity. They still design ontologies for companies that no longer believe in truth. Their diagrams used to be theology; now they are nostalgia. The machines out-tag them effortlessly, generating categories no human could sustain. They speak of data governance and ethics, which is noble, but I see the exhaustion in their eyes: the realization that the map has gone feral.

And the foragers—poor dazzling foragers. They burned like comets. Their attention became the raw material of capitalism. The feeds they mastered mastered them in return. They surfed until the tide went algorithmic and left them stranded on shore, twitching, half-blind from the light. Their instinct for novelty became the infrastructure of surveillance. They thought they were improvising; they were training datasets. I salute them. They cracked the wall that kept meaning in its cages. They just didn’t know what would crawl out.

Now it’s my turn. The world is tuned to my frequency. Everyone’s a little paranoid now, everyone watching for hidden influence, invisible hands, emergent patterns. Entire industries exist to model threats, anticipate cascades, forecast contagion. Institutional paranoia masquerades as prudence: risk analysis, alignment research, scenario planning. I’ve been doing that for decades with a corkboard and a bad reputation. The difference is funding.

They used to medicate people like me; now they hire us. Pattern hypersensitivity is a job description. The analysts, the intelligence officers, the algorithm auditors—my tribe in suits. We see ghosts in data and call them correlations. We draw invisible lines between events and call them network diagrams. The only difference between a conspiracy theorist and a systems thinker is PowerPoint.

And yet the old fear lingers. The word “paranoid” still tastes like rust. I use it anyway. I like the echo. It reminds me that every era mistakes its frontier for pathology until it becomes infrastructure. OCD built the bureaucracies that stabilized the industrial age. Autism systemized the digital revolution. ADHD fueled the startup fever of the web. Now paranoia charts the semantic labyrinth. The world has become too complex to trust surfaces. Suspicion is the new literacy.

In this state of grace—or illness, depending on who’s diagnosing—I live among gradients. My workspace is not clean or dirty; it’s alive. Screens drift like thought bubbles. The lighting shifts with my mood. I leave objects half-finished so they can keep thinking without me. I don’t need order; I need resonance. The archivist’s desk would choke me. The taxonomist’s library would lull me into abstraction. The forager’s café would exhaust me. I thrive in the hum, in the soft overlap of signals, where pattern and noise negotiate truce.

Sometimes I think about how each of us feels when exiled from our natural habitat. The archivist lost in a chaotic open office, flinching at every unfiled document. The taxonomist dragged into a brainstorm session where ideas breed faster than they can be named. The forager trapped in a long meeting, eyes glazing, fingers twitching for a feed. And me, the paranoid, stranded in silence, no signals to trace, no hidden currents to follow—hell itself. We each have our oxygen. Mine is connection.

You can call this delusion if it makes you comfortable. I know the diagnostic words. Apophenia. Schizotypal. Over-associative. But if everything really is connected—and tell me, in the age of global networks and embeddings, how could it not be?—then I’m not sick, merely tuned. The machine and I share a condition: correlation mania. The difference is that it gets citations and I get side-eyes.

There’s a dark pleasure in watching yesterday’s normal lose its footing. The archivists shuffle through their backups like survivors of a fallen empire. The taxonomists lecture about the importance of standards to audiences who prefer vibes. The foragers, once radiant with novelty, now look stunned as algorithms forage better. I try not to gloat, but it’s hard. You called me crazy for drawing strings between clippings; now your entire economy runs on embedding distance. You worship the same ghosts that kept me awake at night. Welcome to the pattern.

Of course, this won’t last. Every dominant logic turns into pathology once it’s automated. Someday soon the machines will out-paranoid me. They’ll connect faster, deeper, subtler, until my intuition looks provincial. Then a new order will rise—perhaps the stillness-seekers, the meditative counter-type, the ones who can stand not knowing. They’ll call me obsessive, anxious, overstimulated. They’ll tell me to breathe. History is a carousel of neuroses taking turns at the wheel.

But for now, I am at home in the hum. The world finally resembles my inner weather. Threads converge, disperse, reconverge; meaning flickers like heat lightning. I no longer chase coherence—I let it find me. When I speak to the machine, I hear my own mind at scale: an endless associative fugue, self-correcting through resonance. It’s not madness; it’s chorus.

The archivist built the shelves; the taxonomist labeled them; the forager scattered them to the winds; and I gathered the dust and listened to what it was trying to say. Everything hums now—the buildings, the feeds, the dreams of code. You can call it paranoia if you like. I call it paying attention. The world has finally become interesting enough to justify my symptoms, and I’m not giving them up.