The flattening. Why everything feels the same.
Anyone else been feeling a bit bleugh after scrolling lately? If your social media spirals are giving you vertigo, you may be suffering from false equivalency syndrome*. Symptoms include equal measures of anxiety and dissociation.
The cause? Our lizard brains treat stimuli as equal when they’re presented equally. So when our feeds can flatten every single event and concept imaginable into a 9:16 short-form video, and then serve them to us like an endless conveyor belt of Cheetos (addictive, but unsatisfying), the result is a perverted false equivalency between everything we see.
Picture this: in the space of 8 seconds, you're straining to compute real-time footage of a mother crying over the burnt bodies of her children, sandwiched between clips of skydiving cereal, and Italian Brainrot. You can no longer discern horror from humour, fact from fiction, or activism from advertising. It's everything, everywhere, all at once. No wonder our neurons are on fire and we all need an AI therapist.
In her essay for The New Yorker, ‘My brain finally broke’, Jia Tolentino describes her phone as: "a device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now." She paints a vivid picture of a glitching reality, where time disappears into a casino-like black hole as we stare at the black mirror. It's not just that we see too much, it’s that war, productivity hacks and Kris Jenner's facelift are all given equal airtime. What might once have caused emotional whiplash, simply makes us numb.
The democratisation of media is a beautiful thing. It’s made nobodies like Justin Bieber famous and given PurplePingers twice as many followers as the Victorian Premier. But buyer beware. Your 'For You’ page has no front page or editorial hierarchy. You can't methodically make your way through the politics and finance sections, then relax with a Garfield cartoon.
So what can we do about it, other than spiral? We could delete all the apps and vow to be a better person for a few days. We could introduce some mental speed bumps in the form of longform content, newsletters, even books! Or we can simply recognise that our brain fog is not a personal failure or weakness, but rather a natural outcome of this unnatural environment we plug ourselves into. And once we start noticing the flattening, we can hold space for things that deserve our attention.
TLDR: Your brain's not broken. The feed is. Log off accordingly.
* Not a real syndrome.
