whatever happens to be the latest term for pathologising your life experience. Everything is flattened, simplified. I worried that being immersed in it was making me think this way too.

Our around-the-clock overexposure to global human suffering, our daily feed of what we once considered catastrophic events — political, ecological, cultural — when combined with diminished attention spans, smaller and smaller chunks of content, and baked-in cross-platform imperatives to remain emotionally removed from any given person, place, or... See more

In a 2024 essay, the jazz critic and music historian Ted Gioia described this pattern as “dopamine culture,” the idea that our online life has been engineered to induce stimulation above all else. “Its most striking feature is the absence of Culture (with a capital C) or even mindless entertainment—both get replaced by compulsive activity,” he... See more