The slow numbing of the human person
Everything feels like too much in modern life to so many people, and this is largely due to the chronic overstimulation so many of us are experiencing.
But it’s not just reducible to a sterile nervous system issue that can easily be reduced to mere deeper breathing exercises and shallow “mental health” concerns, leaving out the deeper true anthropology that could give us real wisdom.
It’s existential, and it has to do with the dulling of our affections and capacity for presence and feeling.
I came across this quote the other day of Fyodor Dostoevsky:
“I felt so much that I began to feel nothing at all.”
He was saying this somewhere near the end of the 19th century, so I think it’s safe to say that maybe our perception of being overwhelmed is valid. Dostoevsky didn’t have the firehose of violence, politics, and various extreme matters of discourse coming at him from a handheld flashing light he couldn’t extricate himself from, and he was still at absolute max capacity.
But he was overwhelmed in the traditional way: via the “valley of tears” known wisely to most Christians since the beginning of the faith, and to every reasonably intelligent human being who has ever lived.
Life, on its own, is a lot. Loss, rejection, financial woes, relational breakdown, political factions—all of it has always been something that has felt beyond us to be able to carry, and it’s arguably why the religious instinct for grace, wisdom, and peace beyond what we see is always so prescient.
When overstimulation becomes a way of life
Dostoevsky was a deeply feeling man, aware of the deep metaphysical questions and the devastating realities of the human heart. He could feel everything and wisely noted that, as a means of survival, one begins to lessen the signal in order to be able to manage the feelings.
In other words, it is a psychological and bodily (and likely even more so spiritual) numbing.
The senses become protracted and protective.
The arrival point, then, is that especially for those of us who are given to a particular sensitivity—known in some circles as the “highly sensitive person” but which is commonly misunderstood as only an emotional sensitivity rather than a fully biological one via a highly attuned nervous system—is that of course the modern world is too much.
Why does everything feel like too much in modern life? Because life is already too much, and we piled on top of that perennial “too much” a constant flood of noise, visuals, and secondhand trauma and expected it to not affect us.
Instead of our leisure time leading to true restoration, we instead fill up our free hours with things that only fray us further.
Returning to what restores us
The answer is to fight heroically to get back to the things that balance out the inevitable heaviness of life, rather than digging ourselves deeper into the whole through compulsive, mind-numbing scrolling in various forms.
We need friends who make us laugh, the creation of music and art to bring us into contact with our inner life and the possibility of the eternal, the movement of our bodies to have the blood flow back into our brains, giving us nourishing, attentive life.
We need to slow down and cook good food, allow our eyes to see the blue of the sky during the day and the stars in the sky at night, and relish a beautiful breeze sweeping in over our bodies on a quiet Sunday afternoon.
We need God, and we need our humanity.
Modern life is particularly exhausting and extractive with all of the things we are constantly complaining about—with good reason—but the reality is that life is hard and what we truly need is to see that and understand that the remedies are simple and what they have always been.
Modern life is too much because we let it be. Nature, silence, and reality await us as soon as we are willing to choose them.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 