Murder and Cat Videos: How Social Media Broke Our Capacity to Feel

When Everything Is a Crisis, Nothing Is: The Numbing Effect of the Infinite Scroll

Scroll through social media, and you’ll see...

Someone being murdered. A cat video. Deep political analysis. Someone performing the latest TikTok dance. Live footage of a war.

All in 60 seconds or less.

It’s become normal. Something that we all take for granted, that we don’t even give a second thought to. But what’s it doing to us? Our brain wasn’t meant to handle this overload of contradictory information, sending so many different signals: fear, love, disgust, laughter, despair, joy… all one after another.

We’re experiencing an emotional whiplash that is training our brain to become desensitized and numb.

Marshall McLuhan predicted this dilemma sixty years ago. Back then, the feed was a handful of curated channels. But he saw where we were headed. He warned that electronic media “extends our nervous system globally.” Up until that point in history, we had been largely local creatures. When we saw or heard a potential threat, our brains were wired to respond as if it were on our doorstep. When we experienced joy or laughter, it was right in front of us, a signal to bond with the human standing across from us. Information was largely local, and our nervous system treated it that way.

With the rise of technology, we started to feel events happening across the planet in real time. McLuhan referred to these changes as being part of a global village. While our nervous system evolved to process information at the tribal level, we now had to deal with a world that essentially fooled us into thinking we were in a global tribe, where every news reel, even if it was far away, signaled that the threat was personal and near.

You can see it in our attention systems. We have an orienting response that draws all of our resources to the potential snake rustling in the grass or the loud noise that may be a gunshot. We’re instantly drawn to signals that surprise or may indicate threat. Even if it’s only a squirrel in the bushes, we’ve learned long ago that it’s better to be safe than sorry. This system prioritizes speed over accuracy, and loads of research show that our modern media hijacks this. It’s why “if it bleeds, it leads” works so well. It “wins” the battle for attention in milliseconds.

And with the rise of the internet, particularly social media, the problem has increased a thousandfold. We literally feel everything, everywhere, all at once.

While many at the time thought that the rise of global information would bring empathy and awareness, McLuhan and others quickly saw that we could just as easily go down a much darker path.

He realized that when we feel everything, we end up feeling nothing. When we’re bombarded by information that all feels local, that pushes us to experience a cacophony of feelings, our brain adapts to deal with the noise. We shut down, we numb out. The constant hits of threat, joy, fear, and disgust become meaningless noise. Our once reliable ability to connect information to feeling or emotions on the local level goes haywire on the global one.

Our feelings and emotions act as both information to help us understand our inner world, and as a nudge towards action. You feel hungry, which pushes you to grab that banana or snack. You feel lonely, and it hopefully nudges you to call a friend. Or, something that all athletes experience: fatigue. It’s both a signal of how much gas we have in the tank and a nudge to slow down during the race. It’s a protective mechanism designed to make sure you don’t actually go to empty and cause damage to your body.

Those systems work pretty well in the real world. But now, imagine that you’re running a race and every 3 seconds you get a different signal. Your brain screams, “I need fuel! No, make that water…You feel great, speed up! Wait, you feel horrible, drop out… You’re going to bonk…You’re in flow…You’re in imminent danger. Stop!” Eventually, you’d either be driven nuts or have to somehow tune out everything because there are too many contrasting messages coming in.

It’s emotional context switching on steroids. And it’s what we experience when we’re scrolling social media online. It’s threat-panic-opportunity-connection all being signaled one after another. This creates a kind of emotional incoherence, where we can’t connect the information coming in to what we’re feeling or experiencing. If our emotional message keeps changing, it’s no wonder our brain just throws in the towel and experiences this kind of disconnect, which often leads to numbness.

McLuhan called this narcosis, from the ancient Greek root meaning numbness. The brain has to numb itself to survive the informational onslaught. But the cost of that is becoming emotionally frozen. What he called “psychic rigor mortis.”

“Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute. The ‘censor’ protects our central system of values, as it does our physical nervous system by simply cooling off the onset of experience a great deal. For many people, this cooling system brings on a lifelong state of psychic rigor mortis.”

McLuhan was discussing the 1960s and 70s. The emotional whiplash he predicted has reached another level today. We’ve gone from the global village to the global asylum.

Recent science backs his theory up and tells us how dire the situation is.

We can see it in how our brains habituate and desensitize. It’s right there in the data. The more time we spend watching violent videos, the less emotionally responsive we become, and crucially, the less sympathy we show for victims of violence. We can see it in our physiology: various studies have found that everything from our blood pressure to our heart rate to our skin conductance, and even the threat areas in our brain, habituate to seeing violence.

The end result is that we become a bit, or seriously, numb. But it’s not just numb to violence. It’s numb to feeling itself. Joy and comedy blur into the same grey noise.

Social media exploits our inbuilt system by overwhelming it with scale. And our brain is left with a suboptimal solution of throwing its hands up and saying what’s the point, our feelings can’t scale with this. More recent work from psychologist Paul Slovic gets at this point. He found that “the more who die, the less we care.” Our emotional response to tragedy and the experience of compassion that comes with it, fades as the numbers increase. Seeing a single person die or suffer moves us. But as that number increases, even from one to two, our emotional response dilutes. We grow indifferent as the number increases. Slovic called it psychic numbing. The rapid-fire mixing of tragedy and triviality accelerates the numbing process.

We often talk about the costs of social media in terms of distraction. We waste hours we could be productive. But it goes much further than that. It’s slowly eroded our ability to feel. To be moved by tragedy. To experience the joys of life. To keep our moral compass calibrated by our principles and values, instead of being taken over by the algorithm.

We can see it in the way we discuss and debate tragic events online. It’s in this weird abstract way. We watch someone die, then debate every angle of the video as if we’re a police investigator. That police officer may need to build in detachment to do their job. But the level of detachment we collectively have, treating every tragedy as if it’s breaking down the latest football play, is kind of insane.

So the cost isn’t only distraction. It’s the slow erosion of appropriate feeling. To be moved by tragedy. To be lifted by joy. To keep your moral senses calibrated. The feed doesn’t just steal our time. It steals our ability to feel human in the moments that matter most. We scroll past atrocities with blank faces. We’re not monsters. It’s that our neural circuitry has been hijacked by algorithms designed to exploit it. The feed demands we care about everything. So we end up caring about nothing. The age of anxiety is also the age of apathy.

What do we do?

We’ve written previously about how to handle your phone on an individual level and the need for greater regulation, especially among kids. But when it comes to the problem of numbing and psychological disconnect between feelings and our experience or actions, a few other tools to consider.

1. Reconnect feeling and action

Do real things in the real world with real people, that are occasionally hard or embarrassing or frustrating. The truth is: reality on the local level is the antidote. Experience our emotions and feelings as they were meant to be felt. Laugh, feel fatigue, experience connection, joy, and everything in between. Sports, arts, and other performance-based activities are great for this. You can’t fake it out on the track or up on stage; you’ve got to feel everything, knowing where it’s coming from, and deal with it.

The same holds true for doing challenging or novel things. Researchers found that it creates psychological richness. Solving a puzzle with your spouse, an escape room with your friends, exploring somewhere new with others: all of these add richness to our lives. They put us in a space where we’re wrestling with reality.

And it applies to the actual things occurring in the world. Instead of scrolling and worrying about whatever controversy or tragedy is happening far away, go local. Run for your local school board, volunteer for the local food bank, coach youth sports, mentor kids at the elementary school. Take that anxiety or worry and turn it into productive action. You don’t have to change the world, but making an actual difference can help you reconnect feeling and action.

2. Balance out superficial with depth

We need a palate cleanse for the online world. Sometimes this simply means “touching grass,” where you go outside, spend time away from your device, or complete a digital Sabbath. Consider it a reset for your brain, where instead of getting caught up in the always-frantic world of your phone, you get to slow down and engage with the world.

Other times, this could be getting lost in something that forces engagement. Reading a good book, building something, working on a craft. It doesn’t matter too much what it is, just something that reminds your brain what it’s like to be deeply absorbed in something that demands your attention. Something where time shifts, and hours pass like minutes.

These are small but impactful steps. And as our world slips further and further into the global asylum, where we’ll have to deal with not only tragedy and cat videos at the same time, but deciding whether that’s a real cat or an AI one, being proactive to protect your brain from defaulting toward numbing is going to be paramount.

-Steve Magness