maybe we are just numb

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“I’ve never enjoyed being fully present, a muted reality has been the landscape I’ve preferred and mainly inhabited forever. Sure, feeling is good, but not too much.”
Mark Lanegan

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“Numbness keeps us from becoming.”

Glennon Doyle Melton

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While ‘increasingly short attention spans’ is a bullshit narrative it is not bullshit to say it is becoming more difficult to figure out what to pay attention to. While the internet has offered the joys of any and all knowledge at your fingertips, it has also offered the despair of being bludgeoned with a steady hailstorm of any and all knowledge (real knowledge, false knowledge, made up knowledge). This bludgeoning has either numbed us or forced us to hide our attention in smaller spaces where we only see the things we want to see.  So. Cognitively we are overloaded (and I only believe it is increasing). McLuhan outlined the issue maybe the best – ‘we ratio.’  We always ratio our attention and technology has simply re-ratioed things for us. In the process of ratioing us we are getting squeezed and, well, being suffocated.  In fact, I believe every one of us runs into a very complex Big Squeeze only amplified by technology. Ok. Let me be a bit more specific. Technology is an equal opportunity distributor of any and all content – true, untrue, useful, useless, and everything in-between. As we get squeezed by all of this we become, well, numb. This isn’t an excuse for people to be derelict in their duty to sift through the garbage to find the non garbage. It is simply a point. People are pattern seeking and within all this stuff it becomes next to impossible to discern real patterns – it is easy to become numb. This gets even trickier because AI systems are designed to recognise patterns, but, contrary to human beings, they do not understand the meaning of these patterns. So we get presented with patterns that, well, don’t exactly align with the meaning, or meaning in general, with what we understand as humans. Faced with enough of that we become numb.

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“Feeling must have rendered her numb.”

Mary Lawson

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‘.. striking a balance between humans and machines … on one side biased and arbitrary human organizations and on the other, soulless technocracy based on unfeeling machines. There is a path.”

Mike Walsh

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I would suggest we do not talk enough about overstimulation, how we numb ourselves to certain things (as a personal defense mechanism and not under some lazy reason) and the fact that the sheer amount of information we are bombarded with forces us to ‘self-ratio’ what we take in and what we assess and how we do both.

Which leads me to how we start parsing out segments & aspects of what could be construed as part of the ‘overstimulation totality.” Here is the deal. Overstimulation, while we want to blame technology, is the combination of the medium, words, pictures, movement, symbols, associations, tone of voice, etc. received in totality. Individual elements, while interesting to debate, have no real meaning on their own. It is the totality in which we begin to re-ratio our attention, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and thoughts. This is compounded by the fact technology is so pervasive it is impossible to turn off – either directly (our own use/input stimuli) or indirectly (we are interacting with people who have extended their senses to link with technology). Reality gets distorted in both the incoming stimulation and the outgoing beliefs (conclusions). This is important because many worthy ideas have been sacrificed at the altar of overstimulation. This makes me a bit uncomfortable to write, but maybe numb is a natural state for many people within the current context.

• In 1964 Marshal McLuhan (Understanding media: Extensions of Man) suggested the idea of numbness associated with the advent of a pervasive technology/media. The idea that as media propagated and became an extension of people it would impact our ‘ratio of things.’ In other words, we would have to choose to reorder what we thought about, how we thought about things and what we would do. Ultimately, should technology infringe too far as part of ‘extension’ we would purposefully numb ourselves simply as part of survival (cognitively, attention, default, etc.).

• In 1970 Alvin Toffler suggested the advent of technology and the rapid changes it would inject into our lives would inevitably create a sense of overstimulation. In other words, so much would be occurring in a finite amount of time we would cognitively go into overload.

What hath technology wrought? Numbness. I am not suggesting it is the sole culprit, but it has amplified less visible issues to visible, small issues to big issues, big issues to existential issues, and our brains have a cognitive issue with all of that. Here is what I believe (and have some research proof):

• The world is not any less, or more, linear (causal relationships exist).
• The world is not moving faster (a minute is still a minute)
• Attention spans have not decreased.
• People have not become stupider.
• Curiosity has not diminished.
• Purposeful ignorance has not increased.

What I will say is that the consequences of numbness veer widely between an inability to say “yes or no” to a steadfast “yes or no.” On one end we retreat and on the other end we become dogmatic. That is the polarization of numbness. Yeah. Even numbness has consequences. Ponder.