Internet Fatigue, Hyper Reality and Narrative Collapse
This is just to say that I have been contemplative and quiet lately. Watching. Thinking. Listening. Looking.
There are many reasons for this, however, one is that I needed to take a step back from social media, but more than this. I am weary of the internet.
What have we become? Where are we headed?
Hyper Reality
The world is within our reach, yet there is a surge in loneliness and isolation. Instead of engaging in profound learning, our children are losing themselves in endless scrolling and constant comparison with their peers. The truth is becoming obscured amid a sea of opinions, false narratives, propaganda, and divergent storylines. People form their perspectives based on a smorgasbord of facts available to them, believing they can construct a well-informed opinion from only a fraction of the story. Unfortunately, this approach often neglects the broader context, and genuine understanding requires more than a few TikTok videos to uncover the complete narrative. This is the hyper-reality people are currently living in.
Baudrillard coined the idea of hyperreality. He defined this hyperreality or simulacrum as an entity that replaces reality with its representations, symbols, or imagery. According to Baudrillard, our modern reality has become a fake world, with the boundary between what is real and what is unreal blurred as a result of the prevalence of false imagery. Contemporary examples include the creation and reshaping of virtual identities in online forums, which frequently bear little resemblance to actual selves, as well as the constant flow of information from 24-hour news channels, emphasizing that the representation has grown in importance over the reality it purports to depict.
I was around before the internet and when it came it was really exciting. There were so many hopes and dreams for what was possible for the world. My favourite was meeting people online that were local to Toronto and, guess what? We actually would meet up in real life! It was fun, too! It was absurd to me to speak with random strangers and not meet them face to face. It seemed like many of us felt the same. That is no longer the case. The internet has changed us, and these changes are not seemingly for the best, in fact, quite the opposite. Mankind has lost touch with reality.
Time Warp
Time seems like it is slipping away. So many are talking about how fast time is moving. What is happening with the collective? Are we doing this to ourselves? Can we really keep blaming “them” when we have accepted all these “advancements”? And what of our natural rhythm of the human experience? Did this completely vanish in the modern world, and how does this absence impact our perception of time?
Now our gadgets beep and bloop at us and keep our adrenals chronically on edge with constant notifications. Never before have we been pinged so consistently with the expectation to respond to everything. I decided to turn off all notifications on my phone and I have found myself even less interested in looking at it. What I did find interesting is how every app constantly reminds me I have notifications off, making their agenda quite obvious, as they know you will use the app less if you are not constantly drawn back in by their Pavlovian buzzing and bell ringing. Oops, here is a piece of evidence that we are, indeed, doing this to ourselves. Have we lost all desire for self-control? Has the nihilism agenda won?
The internet is fast. Communications are often rushed, we are bounced around from app to app, distracted from our focus nearly constantly. Time bends and warps, responding to perception, energy, and frequency. Perhaps this rapid expansion of the internet and especially the acceleration AI has given us can be compared to those last grains of sand finally dropping through the middle. Slowly sinking at the top of the larger sand pile will feel much slower than the moment moving through the narrow path into the next chamber.
The feeling that time is passing more quickly than before has often been associated with the acceleration of daily life, increased responsibilities, and the rapid pace of technological advancements. Many of us are already aware that as individuals get older or experience significant life changes, the perceived speed of time can intensify, creating a sense of time passing at an accelerated rate.
Law of Diminishing Returns
Add into this the law of diminishing returns, rooted in economic theory, which suggests that as one continues to invest resources (time, effort, money) into a particular endeavor, there comes a point where the additional input produces progressively smaller or diminishing outputs. In other words, the benefits gained from additional efforts reach a plateau, and further investment may yield diminishing returns. What happens when our efforts are overshadowed by the input of artificial intelligence? I know that I used to feel far more creative and productive than I do now, and it seems to worsen each year. It’s as if I have to fight to get what I need done when a few years ago it did not feel like such a giant struggle.
This begs the question, how can we use AI as a tool rather than allowing it to make us into fools? Are we just outsourcing our genius? Technically AI is our genius, as it is all our information feeding it.
This interplay between time perception and the law of diminishing returns reflects the complex dynamics of modern life, where the acceleration of time and the diminishing efficacy of certain endeavors contribute to a changing landscape and culture and lead many people to feel very disconnected, lost, and confused.
Adding onto this, our modern pace hyper-reality experience has become one, huge, now…no beginning, no middle, and no end, it just really feels like one big, long day. And it is not the good kind of “now” as Thich Nat Hahn taught me so long ago when I was in University. It is the endless pursuit of “what’s happening now?” with scrolling, seeking, and looking for what’s fresh, hot, current, “in”, and trending. The pressure to stay on top of a quite literally exponentially expanding “update” can make even the highest functioning of us blush at how far behind the information we are and how warped our ideas of reality are becoming.
As my Vipassana Teacher Goenka Ji (S.N. Goenka) would say, do not grasp at things as this can only yield one of two results: either the thing you are grasping at disappears or you disappear. Despite this timeless counsel, the modern world persistently races forward, clutching onto “the now” rather than authentically living it, driven by an innate quest for meaning, relevance, connection, and love. Sadly, it feels like we are chasing the asymptote, a pursuit that does not bear fruit while the drawn-out wanting turns people into hungry ghosts.
So I stopped grasping at my various inboxes and living in the constant energy of guilt and shame because there is no human way to be “all caught up” on any of this, ironically we are all “caught up” inside of it.
Present Shock
There is a book by Douglas Rushkoff called Present Shock where he describes our time crisis in this way. In Ancient Greece there were two words for time: kronos (sequential time) and kairos (decisive time). Kairos is associated with the idea of seizing the perfect moment, recognizing an opportune time for a particular action, decision, or intervention. It emphasizes the significance of the context and the timeliness of an action rather than a strict adherence to chronological time. What happened after the previous reset is an almost total focus on linear, chronological time (time is money) toward this goal of “production.” However, we had to shoehorn this ever-quickening time pace into our existing operating system…and with the recent vaccine murder weapon rollout, it seems like they want to “upgrade” our OS to the internet of bodies and completely divorce us from any semblance of natural time. I can tell you from personal life experience, that it never goes well when nature is suppressed.
He also discusses chronobiology and zeitgebers like the moon, affecting our brain and neurotransmitters. He states that during each moon phase, our activities, and the way we spend our time, should align together. He claims, that during the first week of a new moon, our body tends to be dominated by acetylcholine which is connected to new ideas, being open-minded, and meeting new friends. In the second week of the full moon, we are dominated by serotonin which is about getting things done, making conclusions, and being industrious. In the 3rd week, after the full moon, we are dominated by dopamine which he calls “the party neurotransmitter”, a time when you want to relax and enjoy people and not work and get things done. In the final week of a moon, we are dominated by norepinephrine which makes us more analytical, a desire to become more organized, and helps us see the big picture.
Our addiction to scrolling through the digital world is fraying the delicate threads of our nervous systems. In this ceaseless torrent of information, our ability to maintain focus is being eroded, as we are incessantly tugged in a myriad of directions simultaneously. The sheer amount of data on offer is tricky to manage. People at all stages of life have to “catch up” on all this information and work to chase the “now” of what is going on in the world.
The narrative of our lives has disintegrated into what feels like an interminable “now” – a singular, never-ending day where time dissolves into obscurity and our natural rhythms are tragically disregarded. In this unending continuum, the boundaries that once demarcated our days have blurred, and we are left adrift in a sea of digital noise, struggling to remember the organic cycles that once governed our existence.
Will our collective heart rebel and tear away at the fabric of this warped reality we have co-created, will we invent drama and destruction to make the internet go away for our own survival? Ironically, time will tell.
Solutions
For now, I offer the following solutions. Meditate daily. (I love UNDO app a natural meditation support app. Use code YUMMY23 for a month free.) Find the truth within you. Infinity is found inside yourself. Turn off all non-essential internet notifications and limit your browsing and scrolling time. Connect in real life without devices. Try to research themes that you decide rather than let the internet dictate what you learn that day. Block your day up into time segments. Structure your day in modules – morning, afternoon, evening, and then into further, smaller segments. Dedicate time for tasks, and schedule time for self-care, contemplation, and connection with nature.
If you want help getting your needs, wants and goals sorted I have designed a course just for it called Your Holistic Self-Assessment Course. This course is to help you become clear about your desires and re-evaluate your beliefs so you can have clarity and confidence to make choices that are best for your life, in alignment with where you are now.
Life is about choices and we are at a critical crossroads in the history of mankind. It is time for us to mature into spiritual adults, find our natural biorhythm once again, and break free from the hyper-real, as it is unsustainable and by natural law edicts, must collapse, one way or another. Choose your path wisely.
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Amandha D Vollmer (ADV)
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Degree of Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine
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