Why Do I Feel Nothing?

A flatness a lot of people are carrying: you say "I feel nothing," but it isn't quite true. You can still enjoy a thing once it's in front of you, what's gone is the wanting, the reaching, the appetite that used to come before the thing arrived. This episode takes that word, anhedonia, and shows it isn't the loss of pleasure at all. It's the loss of desire.Going underneath both the chemistry account and the gentler "your numbness is a signal" account, it makes a harder claim: the numbness is satiation mistaken for emptiness.

For all of history wanting was free and getting was hard, so we stayed hungry, now getting is frictionless and the appetite itself has been farmed and exhausted by a feed that wants on your behalf. A person who never has to reach has nothing left to feel the reaching with. The cure isn't more pleasure or fewer screens, it's the deliberate reintroduction of wanting: choosing a hard thing the world didn't hand you and staying hungry in it.

Appetite is the proof of life, and you let yours be outsourced.

How this page was made: the text is the episode's own show notes from The Architect Speaks, written by Michael Lauria.