Jenn Granneman

They learned to suppress their feelings, to treat one another transactionally, to care less. After all, they had to. They heard

How could they possibly extend empathy, or even simple acknowledgment, to everyone they met? Instead, they closed off their hearts out of necessity.

Unable to react meaningfully to every new piece of information, overstimulated citizens were apt to become “blasé” or, simply put,4 apathetic.

Humanity, Simmel was saying, was too sensitive for such a life.

of 2020, we produce7 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data per day. At that rate, roughly 90 percent of all the data in human history has been created in the last five years. Every scrap of this data, in theory, is aimed at someone’s brain.
The human animal is not designed for such unlimited input. Rather, our brain is a sensitive instrument.

Innovation, he suggested,1 had not just given us more efficiency; it gave us a world that taxed the human brain and its ability to keep up. He described a nonstop stream of “external and internal stimuli”2 in a loud, fast, overscheduled world. Far ahead of his time, he suggested that people have a limited amount of “mental energy”3—something we now know to be more or less true—and that a highly stimulating environment consumes far more of it.