On Cheap Spectacles and Discourse Burnout
"TV taught me how to feel, now real life has no appeal..."
What makes you feel whole? What makes you feel as though your life is worth it?
Is it a hobby you dedicate painstaking amounts of time, effort, and focus toward? Is it the company of your closest companions and those tipsy giggles shared over silly moments? Is it the work you wake up every day to complete and the relief you feel upon scribbling checks on the boxes that torment your to-do list?
Someone quite close to me said, quite recently in a conversation interposed by the screech of Metro wheels on its track, that motherhood is “the most important thing” a woman could ever do. If that is indeed true, then conceiving and raising a child could create that sense of wholeness.
One thing I can say is that, at this point in time for me, pedestrian, bargain-bin discourse on social media does not make me feel whole. Worse – it coats my mental aura thick with a layer of sludge and distracts me from the things that should make me feel as though life is worth it.
You know what I mean? It’s visual sludge, it’s audible sludge – it’s so sludgy, it’s brain rot. Sometimes pointless crap can be fun in an ironic sense. If any normal person saw the memes that make me laugh, they’d probably think I had no marbles in the first place.
But once the more sober-minded side of my brain wakes up and shoos the batty bits away, I can’t help but feel hungover from the internet’s binge of brain rot.
Burnout experts (yeah, that’s a real thing I guess) say that, in the workplace, this condition is “caused by prolonged exposure to stressful workplace conditions,” and that, if you’re to overcome these feelings of immense energy depletion, you need to find your “sweet spot of stress.”
This concept, originally called the “optimal zone of arousal” by neurobiologist Dr. Dan Siegel, explains how we should all try to find our window of tolerance to better regulate our emotions, plan and execute our tasks, and remain productive. In that comfy little window, we neither feel overstimulated and anxious nor understimulated and withdrawn.
I get how a person can theoretically find their sweet spot of stress in the workplace and operate on a more centered, grounded frame of mind. But I have to be perfectly honest with you: I don’t know if I can compute my own sweet spot of stress for the internet.
As is the case with alcohol, physical exertion, heat, or what have you, we’ve all got our own, unique thresholds for stress. And, our bodies react accordingly.
Drink too much and you’ll have a splitting headache the next day. Lift too heavy at the gym and you’ll pull a muscle. Spend too much time in the sun and you’ll get burned. Well, I’ve spent too much time on the internet now and I’ve gotten burned out.
What I’m struggling to do is find my healthy baseline. My sense of equilibrium in the ever-flowing, cursive waves of digital debates.
I can give myself a regular dose of escapism but much of my work is online, many of my friends are best contacted online, and many sources of niche interests and entertainment are online. The internet groomed any sense of normalcy out of me from a young age.
My generation toys with tech resistance. We know deep down that we weren’t built for the stimulants we’re fed like pigs being raised for slaughter.
We can turn our phones off and go on a walk, we can connect with our friends over a pint of beer or mug of coffee, but no matter how much we cut down on tech we inevitably have to go back. We can take extra, deep breaths to engage our senses while cooking a fragrant, delectable meal or soak up all the sensational sounds of music we’re listening to live.
Still, we have to go back.
I wish I had a positive note to end on, an uplifting bit of advice for how I’ve overcome discourse burnout and re-emerged a refreshed woman excited by all the chitter chatter online.
But in all honesty, I have no fail-safe strategies to share today. All I have is this brief confessional – if you’re also depleted by cheap spectacles, you’re not alone.