ATTENTION OVERLOAD

What looks like numbness is often survival, but choosing presence transforms coping into a pathway back to meaning

By Christopher Michael

There was a time when a single photograph could stop the world. Today, a great image is just another tile in the feed. How did we get here? To a place where content barely pauses the thumb? The lazy explanation often begins and ends with blaming the lobotomizing nature of social media, that humanity has been barreling toward the banal, growing ever more vapid and indifferent with each passing day. But the truth is more complicated. More than anything, this growing indifference is a matter of self-preservation, our most primal instinct, governing how we show up in and navigate our experience of the world.

For decades, studies have underscored the cavernous and growing divide between the speed of cultural evolution and the lagging pace of our biology to keep up. Neuroscientists use the term “cognitive overload” to describe the mental stress caused by an overabundance of information. The human brain is designed to filter out the vast majority of sensory data, but modern society constantly pushes against this limit with its demands for attention, multitasking, and nonstop connectivity.

One widely cited comparison notes that a single week of the New York Times in the early 2000s already contained more information than the average person in the 17th century would have encountered in their entire lifetime. Now imagine the implications today, when the rate of data creation and dissemination has only continued to accelerate, and the world’s wars and horrors are flanked by your favorite creator’s latest activation and an adorable animal thriving after its recent adoption on The Dodo.

In June 1985, National Geographic published a cover by Steve McCurry that became known as the “Afghan Girl.” Her piercing green eyes conveyed the plight of millions, making the distant human cost of war tangible for a global audience.

While sifting through content that contains graphic imagery, there may be moments of selective outrage, but there is also a great deal of normalization as people carry on with their day.This particular phenomenon can be explained by hedonic adaptation, a psychological concept that refers to the mind’s tendency to return to a baseline level of emotional response, no matter how extreme the stimulus. A shocking photograph might jar us the first time we see it, but with repeated exposure, its impact diminishes as our brains recalibrate in order to cope, effectively causing a neurological adjustment that allows us to keep scrolling. In this way, hedonic adaptation helps explain why outrage fades so quickly online and why tragedies, however devastating, can be absorbed into the background noise of everyday consumption. Our brains are not built for infinite exposure, and when faced with an endless scroll of violence, glamour, and distraction, the nervous system acclimates, not because we don’t care, but because we must survive the overload.

Social media and information overload have essentially flattened our perception, and with it, our human ability to attribute adequate meaning to actual tragedy, let alone anything else consumed through such channels; but we also can’t disregard the significant impact of boredom-phobia. The rising inability to be present without distraction or action means that, whether watching a film, streaming a series, walking down the street, or even in conversation with a friend, most people instinctively reach for their phones, a snack, a drink, a cigarette, or vape. Only a fraction of their attention is allocated to the activity at hand, while the rest is dispersed across a multitude of background programs and hypothetical scenarios running in the mind. We then feel overloaded, and avoidance takes over. We reach for anything that will dull the edge—more distractions, escapist behaviors, or simply shutting down the parts of our mind that would force us to sit with uncomfortable emotions. But avoidance doesn’t restore us; it drains us. Think about the times you’ve sprawled on the couch, binge-watched a show, and ended up more exhausted than before. That isn’t rest. It’s fatigue masquerading as relief.

Skip the task, swallow the emotion, dodge the conversation, and for a moment, the pressure lifts. It feels easier, safer. But the work remains undone. The feeling unprocessed. The conversation unresolved. What we’ve bought is a pause instead of a resolution, and the cost grows heavier the longer we carry it.

Every act of suppression drains energy. It takes effort to push a thought away, to redirect attention, to build layer upon layer of distraction. That effort is invisible, but it’s still exhausting. The brain is burning fuel to maintain avoidance, siphoning off the energy we need to confront what we’re running from. And so the weight accumulates, pressing down as fatigue, lethargy, or the hollow tiredness that comes from living out of sync with what we know we need to face. Ultimately, until we see through the illusion of avoidance, we stay stuck in a cycle where exhaustion only grows.

Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest offers a chilling allegory for this split-screen existence when showing how horror can be organized, domesticated, and made almost invisible if hidden behind high hedges and daily rituals.

The film speaks to appearances and the moral weight they can carry. The banality of the domestic scenes sits in stark relief against the violence implied just out of frame. The result is less melodrama and more of an unnerving quiet and a reminder that the most sinister forms of detachment rarely arrive in full costume; they slip in through the habit of looking away.

That same cycle of avoidance and fatigue plays out in our professional lives, too, especially for Millennials and Gen Z. This isn’t a glitch in a single vertical; it’s a symptom of something larger, a cultural system straining against its own design. To ignore how differently younger generations are neurologically wired, shaped by the nonstop stimuli of their formative years, isn’t just shortsighted. It’s foolish—especially when trying to understand why anxiety levels have risen and why the majority of younger people report higher levels of burnout. Balancing the pursuit of purposeful work with the constant task of deciding which aspects of reality’s continual flood that we allow to hold meaning leaves us struggling to summon the energy needed to feel connected to any kind of bigger picture.

Cue the crescendo, the sound of a solution being ushered in. Nobody is suggesting that we must become reactionary pinballs, ricocheting helplessly off every external variable with no agency over our own experience. Nor are we meant to live in a permanent state of anguish, heartbreak, or despair, bracing for a future constantly threatened by innovation, doomsday podcasts, or the next alarming news segment. It’s about reclaiming the pauses we’ve learned to fear. Boredom is not the enemy; it’s the opening. When we allow ourselves to sit in those unfilled spaces, the Default Mode Network activates, weaving together fragments of memory, imagination, and insight. It’s the brain’s creative workshop, where problems are quietly solved, ideas surface, and connections are made that frantic activity would never allow.

Reframing boredom as value, rather than void, shifts everything. Instead of scrambling for constant stimulation or numbing distraction, we can begin to notice what emerges in stillness. This practice of allowing meaning to arise, of treating pauses as fertile ground instead of wasted time, is what sustains a life of depth, but also one of meaning. It’s a long game, one where attention is directed toward purpose, relationships, and creativity.

Indifference is the short game. It numbs more than it engages, and it lets us survive another day, but without the substance that makes survival worthwhile. Perhaps if we learn to embrace boredom, we can successfully choose presence over avoidance, imagination over numbness, and meaning over mere maintenance. A sort of rebellion against the flattening forces of overstimulation and a refusal to live life on autopilot.

Earlier this year, a video circulated of a Lebanese wedding that carried on with music and dancing even as Iranian missiles cut across the night sky. It wasn’t a celebration of violence, nor a gesture of indifference. It was something else entirely: a glimpse of joy holding its ground in the face of chaos and an instinct for resilience that many in the West might mistake for denial.

That is not overwhelm, not panic, but the capacity to stay rooted—to choose meaning even when circumstances tempt us toward numbness.

This is the pivot we need. The culture has taught us that avoidance is a tool, that if we mute, scroll, suppress, or distract, we’ll feel safer. But the fatigue we carry tells another story. Numbness isn’t safety, it’s erosion. The real work is subtler and a form of practiced presence alongside the discipline of noticing, of letting meaning emerge in real time, in boredom, in silence, in the moments we usually rush to fill.

What we’re exploring isn’t the short game of distraction. It’s the long game of depth and meaning. It’s what allows imagination to resurface, relationships to deepen, and clarity to cut through the noise. Indifference may keep us alive, but only attention and feeling make life worth living.