When I was a kid, my friend's older sister took us up in their attic where she had set up a Ouija board. I remember we placed our little fingers on the pointer, the planchette, as she asked a question. As the planchette slid from letter to letter, she told us spirits were spelling out messages from the other side. Even then I remember thinking, that doesn't seem right. There's no ghost in here. Something else must be going on. It took me years to look up what that something was, and the real answer turns out to be stranger than ghosts, because it explains a lot more than a toy.
It's called the ideomotor effect. When several people rest their fingers on something like the planchette of a Ouija board, every one of them makes tiny, unconscious muscle movements. Nobody feels themselves pushing, they think they're holding still, but the micro movements add up, and the pointer glides, spelling out words no single person intended. Everyone is moving it, and no one is.
Hang on to that thought, because this isn't really about a Ouija board. The idea has stayed with me for 35 years and resurfaced recently. Every day, billions of us wake up and put our hands on a different kind of board. One we call civilization. We buy things, we consume, we produce, we trade our hours for money and often attention for whatever's loudest. And every one of those choices is tiny. Each one feels like nothing. A few minutes here, a few dollars there, like resting a fingertip on a piece of plastic.
People love to say we vote with our dollars, with our attention. I've said it too, but I think that's too simple. Voting is a deliberate choice. You know you're doing it. The way most of us live feels nothing like voting. It's more like an unconscious pressure, moving you in directions you never willingly chose, that you would swear isn't what you want.
Billions of hands on the same board, everyone following the faint pressure of everyone else, everyone insisting they're not the one steering. And the board spells out traffic, markets, social feeds, the whole machine we call civilization, a thing that seems to move with a mind of its own. Of course it seems that way. That's exactly what a Ouija board feels like.
So if no one's steering, what's making the movements? What's the pressure in everyone's fingers? My honest belief? Fear. Fear of survival. Look at what most of us actually do with our days. We strive, we accumulate, we chase raises, promotions, titles. Ask anyone why and you get a version of the same answer. Because I have to. Because I have to pay my rent. Because I have to save for retirement. Because I don't want to end up on the street.
American psychologist Abraham Maslow drew human needs as a pyramid. Survival at the bottom and meaning at the top. Most people never get past the bottom half for one simple reason. The board keeps them there in survival mode. Although we rarely call it that. I know what I was doing the last 20 years. Chasing income, status, promotions. Definitely not in the meaning section of the pyramid. Back then I wouldn't have called it fear. I would have chalked it up to ambition. But that's the thing about unconscious movement. It doesn't feel like anything at all. It just happens and you watch as your life is spelled out for you.
Now some of us see all this and rage against the machine. We blame the corporations, the politicians, the algorithm, and we're not wrong. There really are structures that concentrate power and profit. Some hands press much harder than others. I can already hear you saying this is exactly what the people steering hardest want you to believe. That it's all of us equally. It isn't equal. It never has been.
But here's the part we rarely admit. The board doesn't move without the rest of us. Every dollar we spend, every hour we trade, every minute of attention we give. That's the force that keeps it gliding. We aren't bystanders to the system we complain about. We're the medium it moves through. We keep our hands on the planchette, swearing someone else is moving it.
But if we admit we're the ones moving it, then what? What do we do? Take our hands off. Part of me wants to say yes. Just let go. All of us at once. Drop our hands and let the spell break. But I know what that means. Deliveries stop. Garbage piles up. The machine doesn't power down gently. It seizes. Things would get ugly fast. Maybe that's the price of waking up. Or maybe that's reckless. Maybe the cure would be worse than the trance. I won't pretend to know.
Here's the only thing I'm sure of. We can't keep pretending the board is moving on its own. We can't keep living in survival mode and calling it civilization. So maybe the question isn't, what's the answer? Maybe it's, what are you willing to let go of?
