What happens when self-awareness becomes self-surveillance?

What if the thoughts that could change everything are the ones we filter out before they even fully form?

I recently caught myself editing my own thoughts in real time.

Not just the ones I write, but the ones I think. Yes, mortifyingly, you read that right.

A sentence would start to form in my mind, a new idea, musing or something that I might like to sit and explore for my work or my clients… and before it even landed, I’d instinctively shape it into something more… acceptable. Something that wouldn’t get misread.

Now, I have actually had this habit for a long time. Being the “person who wrote the headlines” in a newspaper ads department at the very beginning of my career (*cough*) about 17 years ago, bred some weird headline habits into my blood.

I think in isms. Digestibility and 10-word optimisations.

For a while, I brushed it off. But when I caught myself doing it in real time — when I realised it wasn’t just a habit but how I literally think — that stopped me cold.

I wasn’t doing it because I believed the original thought was wrong — but because I knew how easily it could be misconstrued in an internet culture that rewards certainty over curiosity.

My dreams are still haunted by angry, faceless trolls and Random Internet Men who can’t stand the thought of someone else having… well thoughts.

And that’s when it hit me:

I wasn’t just self-censoring in my public expression.
I was optimising my thoughts before they even became thoughts.

Because that’s what happens when you spend years in an system that values performance over process.

You start to unconsciously train your mind to pre-optimise.
To pre-edit.
To pre-filter.

Because real thinking is messy, slow, uncertain.

And there’s no place for that in a world where only the fastest and 2200 character-friendly ideas survive.

This is the real cost of self-surveillance — not just that it flattens public discourse, but that it shrinks our capacity to think deeply at all.

Which is why, lately, I’ve been thinking about:

• How much of our ‘authentic’ expression is shaped by what we know will perform well.

• How platforms have conditioned us to share the easiest-to-swallow version of everything, even ourselves.

• How the obsession with polish has stripped raw, unfinished, and inconvenient ideas from public discourse.

• Whether the things we think are "good" are actually good, or just widely approved / very effective performative outrage.

And most of all:

What happens when an entire generation learns to think in headlines — and forgets how to think beyond them?