Everyone is numbing out
Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even ... See more
Catherine Shannon • Everyone Is Numbing Out
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 ev... See more
Heather Havrilesky • The Rise of Emotional Divestment
TWENTY WAYS TO MATTER
Excavate the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth —
the deeper you go, the simpler it gets:
the longing, love, insecurity, rage, loss —
all of it part of the same fabric,
all just a story
emerging from the quantum foam.
Move through the world
knowing that everyone around you
is doing the best they can,
that humanity is capable
of th
This disconnect between culturally mandated politics and the actual demonstrated preferences of most Americans has created an enormous reserve of unmet needs—and a generational opportunity. Build new things! Create great art! Understand and accept that sensory information is the brain’s food, and that Silicon Valley is systematically starving us of... See more
the most popular way to quell this unsettling sense of not-at-home-ness is by trying to make ourselves at home in the world, even if that looks like mostly distracting ourselves from the unsettling fact of our alienation.