Everyone is numbing out

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working f

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“Take the boom in reality shows, the rise of the ‘dissociative pout’ or the fact young people are smoking again as examples of ways we’re detaching ourselves from the emotional burdens of modern society.”

In general, whenever human history darkens, this impulse—to obscure meaning, to flatten affect, to don expressive masks—emerges. Chaos erupts, entropy spreads, mistrust multiplies. There’s some occult math at work: Overturn enough treasured assumptions at a proper velocity, and we will begin to doubt even our most basic impulses.