The epidemic of overwhelm

February 15, 2023

Dear Leland,

Yesterday I promised that I would offer my reasons for writing these letters as they applied to the daily topics.  So here goes:  a secondary reason why I write these letters is that I believe the world is about to start changing, rapidly, to the degree that you may live your adult life in completely different world than I.  It’s entirely plausible that your generation looks back and wonders what my generation was thinking regarding some of our collective actions.  These letters are meant to provide context on the world in which I live, so that you may understand more about the world you inherit.  

On Monday I talked about my individual overwhelm.  Sadly, I think I’m far from alone in reaching a state of what we colloquially call ‘burnout’, but what might otherwise be described as living in a constant state of overwhelm.  In my conversations with friends and peers, I have observed countless others in a similar state.  And I don’t think it’s just my peer group that is suffering.  

To help outline the problem, permit me to contrast the current world to the world of my childhood.  

When I was your age, if you wanted to make (or receive) a phone call, you had to go to a building with a phone.  This would most commonly be your house or your work, but if you were at the grocery store our out to dinner with friends, you didn’t call anyone, and no one called you.  Today, we carry our phones with us, and make and receive phone calls whenever we like, from wherever we like.  

Similarly, when I was your age, if we wanted to know something, we looked in a book.  Some families had encyclopedias at home to increase the number of answers you could glean without leaving your home.  Your other option was to go to either your local library or bookstore and look for the book that possessed the information you wanted.  Today, as you already know, we go online (you sometimes instruct me, “Dad, ask Siri”).  And the phones we carry are in fact mini supercomputers capable of connecting us to almost every piece of information the world has ever known.  

When I was your age, if we were bored, our entertainment options were analogue.  Sometimes we went out in search of others to ‘play’ with.  Sometimes we read a book, for pleasure.  Sometimes we sat down to watch a scheduled television program (because if you didn’t watch it as it was broadcast, you couldn’t watch it later).  Today we mostly pursue digital entertainment options.  We might text our friends to socialize.  We might go on social media to see what others are doing, including both friends and famous people.  We might scroll headlines, to see what is going on in the news.  Or we might sit down and watch almost anything that has ever been filmed via the internet.  

Finally, when I was your age, my dad went to work, did his work at work, and when he came home his workday was finished.  I later realized that he transformed into an entirely different persona each day at work, and then transformed back into my dad each night.  If some emergency happened, my Dad might receive a phone call at home (and later, he would carry a pager); but these interruptions were rare.  Today, we bring our work computers home with us each night.  And as already mentioned, we carry our phones with us everywhere.  We often take work calls, or send work emails, or do other forms of work, from home.  So as your dad I make that transformation from work persona to dad persona far more often, and far faster, than my dad ever did.  

In countless ways, these technologies have improved our lives.  We know more, we learn faster, we share information faster, and we have more individual choice than ever before.  Those are all wonderful things.  But technology is also overwhelming our physiology.  The temptation to look up that thing we don’t know, or go online and see what our friends are doing, or to ping our friends, keeps us on high alert.  And even when we decide we are ready for a break, our friends might ping us, or work might call or text, or any number of apps on our phone might give us an alert.  Each one of these interruptions provides a jolt of stimulus unknown to the world of my childhood.  As a result, many of us never really ‘come down’ from the rush of stimulus, and our systems remain on alert in a way that no prior generation has ever known.

From experience, I can tell you that the overstimulus becomes habitual.  I became so used to being overstimulated that I struggled, whether during family dinners, socializing with friends, or even during weeklong vacations, to reset to a ‘normal’ state of being.  This habitual overstimulation is precisely why I am taking this time off of work: to reset my system by dramatically reducing my sources of stimulus.  

As I approached my ‘mini-retirement’, I was fascinated by the responses of my friends and peers.  Many shared their own examples of overstimulus and fatigue.  Several expressed jealousy, and intimated that they themselves wanted to but ‘couldn’t’ do what I was doing.  Several expressed the same fear I had of not being able to find another job if they quit; on some level deep level we intuit that once we exit the game of overstimulus, we are unlikely to ever want to go back. 

I don’t think these problems are confined to my peer group. A huge and growing percentage of Americans are on antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, and/or stimulants.  I found one estimate that, in 2020, 77 million Americans were taking one psychiatric drug or another.  That’s almost a quarter of the country, including kids.  We’re seeing news headlines about fentanyl use and more broadly an opioid epidemic. About 7 in 10 adults in America are overweight, and about 4 in 10 are obese.

We are increasingly overwhelmed and miserable, and are using anxiety meds, antidepressants, stimulants, and food to cope.

Americans today are the proverbial frog in boiling water, unaware they are being boiled to death. It’s entirely possible that I am only able to notice any of this because I lived outside the country. Your mom and I lived abroad for five years; when we returned four years ago, the country felt like a completely different place. It’s hard to comprehend how much the increase in digital stimulus changed in such a short time.

What we’re doing isn’t sustainable, not just for me, but for American society at large. The trajectory were on leads to unhappy lives shortened by disease. We need to find ways to reduce our digital stimulus. We need to ‘switch off’ and live at a slower pace, for a few hours a day and a few weeks a year, and probably even a few months every few years. We need to replace the ‘excitement’ of a text or infuriating social media post with time spent connecting with others, building or reinforcing relationships.

As of today, I can only help me. I can reduce the amount of stimulus in my life, and reset my habits so that I am not constantly overwhelmed. Hopefully I can encourage a few others along the way, and help find more scalable solutions.

Here’s hoping we start making changes to create meaning and reduce suffering. You can be the judge of how well we did.

I love you,

Dad