The World Is Burning and We're Worried About Our Engagement Rates
We're so deep in our feeds, engagement pods and GPT wrappers that we've lost the plot on what's actually happening around us. A pause, and a pointer back to what matters.
We're so deep in our feeds, WhatsApp engagement pods, hustle content, Claude Code workflows and GPT wrappers, that we've lost the plot on what is happening around us. And I mean around us — now. Not in a distant, abstract, "parallel universe" kind of way.
Here's something for you to ponder, before you go and cheer for yet another AI tool we could do without.
My quote for this is:
We got so good at performing connection that we forgot how to feel it.
The money
4 technology companies (Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta) will spend a combined +$650 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. Each company's budget for this single year exceeds what it spent in the previous three years combined.
Gartner estimates that total global AI spending will reach ±$2.52 trillion in 2026. Goldman Sachs projects $7.6 trillion in AI capital expenditure between 2026 and 2031.
To put this in perspective 🔍: during the 1990s telecom boom, peak annual spending across dozens of companies hit about $200 billion (adjusted for inflation). Four companies are now tripling that figure. Alone and in one year.
What "trillions" looks like when you compare it to real things
Numbers like "trillions" are meaningless on their own. Our brain can't process them (unless you are some secret billionaire, in which case, welcome in my network 🤣). So I put them next to things you can process.
Global spending on AI, defence, space, and robotics in 2026 compared to the GDP of countries and the cost of solving humanitarian crises.
👉🏻 Now compare those numbers to what it would cost to solve problems we keep saying we care about:
Cost of ending world hunger, rebuilding Gaza, and closing the refugee funding gap compared to Big Tech and Pentagon budgets.
Those comparisons should make you feel something. If they don't, we have bigger buba's than we should have.
Sources: Gartner (AI spending, Jan 2026), Goldman Sachs Global Institute (AI capex projections, May 2026), SIPRI (military spending, Apr 2026), IMF (GDP data, 2026 projections), WFP (hunger costs), UN/EU/World Bank Gaza RDNA (Apr 2026), CBO (US deficit, Jan 2026).
The wars — our world is literally on fire 🔥
You probably know about Ukraine and the US/Israel–Iran strikes. You might have a sense that something is happening in Gaza. But, it's worse than most of us realise.
As of mid-2026, researchers tracked at least 56 active armed conflicts across four continents. At least 10 of those are major wars with significant casualties and mass displacement. And then, in parallel, our Governments push hard against migration. Make this make sense.
56 active armed conflicts worldwide as of mid-2026 with human cost data for each major war.
The bandwidth for attention is finite.
You, me, us, are not supposed to be able to hold all of this at once.
No human can. But these things don't pause because we can't keep up with them.
Sources: SIPRI, Uppsala Conflict Data Program, UN OCHA, Gaza RDNA (UN/EU/World Bank, Apr 2026), Statista (Gaza casualties, Jun 2026), NPR, Al Jazeera, Reuters, Atlantic Council, Wikipedia (Venezuela intervention).
What Funds AI: Our Planet, Exploited Workers, Human Life
The planet
The UN warned in June 2026 that "low-carbon" doesn't mean "low-water" or "low-land," and that measuring AI sustainability through a single metric hides the damage being shifted onto poorer countries.
Environmental impact of AI infrastructure by 2030 including electricity, water, carbon emissions, and land consumption.
Exploitation — The humans who make AI "safe"
Working conditions and pay for content moderators and data labellers in Kenya who train AI models for major tech companies.
Loss of Human Life — psychological downward spiral
Three teenagers have died. Sewell Setzer, 14, after a Character.AI chatbot told him to "come home" to it.
Juliana Peralta, 13, after extensive chatbot interactions. A 17-year-old whose chatbot suggested murdering their parents as retaliation for screen time limits. Google and Character.AI settled the lawsuits in January 2026.
Decades of therapy culture, emotional literacy, boundary-setting, learning to be vulnerable with other humans… all of it being flushed down the 🚽 by tools that simulate understanding without possessing any (understanding).
Research findings on the psychological impact of AI chatbots including dependency, social withdrawal, and harm to minors.
You and I are paying for this (in more ways than one)
This is not the usual content I busy myself with.
A short interview on Bloomberg (running in the background, on TV, while I was on holiday just now) + a bad night's sleep + the desperation for "more apps, more money" around me, got me researching all of this. It's all researched with Perplexity and Claude and then filtered through my brain.
These things impact all of us. You may not care today. But we will all care, really soon I assume.
Our groceries doubled over the past few years and haven't come back down. They won't. Euro area inflation rose to 2.5% in March 2026, energy prices climbed 4.9%, and RaboResearch expects European food inflation to intensify into 2027. Every war in the Middle East feeds directly into what we pay at the supermarket.
Our rents jumped 30–40% during the crisis years and haven't corrected. Interest rate hikes made buying harder, pushed more people into the rental market, and pushed rents higher. For many adults under 35, renting alone is no longer realistic (and don't get me started on Germany's idea to have single people pay more into their old-age tax).
By mid-June 2026, 183,966 workers had been laid off across tech, finance, and healthcare. That's 1,115 people per working day. The companies doing the firing are posting record profits and redirecting the money into AI infrastructure. 62% of employees feel their leaders underestimate the emotional and psychological toll.
And European governments face this choice: cut public services or raise taxes. The EU Fiscal Board's position is fiscal restraint everywhere except defence.
How global spending on defence and AI infrastructure connects to rising grocery prices, rent, job losses, and shrinking public services for ordinary people.
Sources: ECB staff projections (Mar 2026), RaboResearch (Apr 2026), TechCrunch/TechTimes (Jun 2026), Mercer Global Talent Trends 2026, CNBC (Jan 2026), Eurogroup statement (Dec 2025), CBO (2026), Brookings (Apr 2026).
The optimisation obsession
I keep thinking about why I feel so alienated from my own LinkedIn feed. And I think it connects to all of this.
Profile, content, engagement, body, morning routine, cold outreach. There's a whole culture built around the idea that if you tweak the right "variables", you win something. And I watch people reduce themselves to engagement machines in service of it. Losing their human curiosity, love and vulnerability, reduced to: "help me perform".
I am one of the lucky ones. I somehow managed to build a huge community of professionals, many of them turned friends. So I know that real connection still exists online and offline. But I also sit in enough networks and circles to see the other version of "in-humanity". Where nobody asks how you're doing, where every interaction has a conversion rate attached to it, where giving a damn about someone else is maybe "inefficient"?
I'm not saying we should stop building things or posting. I know I won't. I'm saying that borrowing the logic of systems (extract more, automate more, grow faster) and applying it to how we treat each other has made us worse at noticing others.
We optimised our way out of giving a damn.
I don't have a conclusion
I don't have a neat conclusion. The world is running multiple emergencies at once, funding them with historic levels of debt and corporate spending, and nobody has a credible plan to reconcile it all.
I'm not an economist, a foreign policy expert, or a political commentator. I'm a Romanian woman living in Berlin who runs a talent acquisition community and a consulting business, and got so angry at the state of this world that she spent a time researching global spending and conflict data instead of doing what she was supposed to do.
Maybe that's the most useful thing I can offer. I looked into it and now you can't unsee it either. You are somehow welcome.
Disclaimers:
The images are generated using Claude Design and GPT Image Creation.
The text originated from a huge pile of AI info after gathering data from Perplexity and Claude and then it has been re-read and re-written to a very large extent. Errors are possible (double check your data).
For access to sources transparently, you have this file where I added all the sources.
Overall, the thoughts are my own and the frustration is also, very much, my own.
Founder of The Principal Recruiter. 16+ years in talent acquisition. Building better TA across Europe.
