An old friend called earlier this week. We’ve known each other long enough to avoid the performance of catching up. The conversation moved quickly to the things people our age tend to talk about: parents, health, fatigue, work, the vague feeling that the days are somehow heavier than they used to be.
At one point, she paused and said, “This year feels weird.” I laughed, because I knew exactly what she meant. It does feel weird.
Not because anything dramatic has happened. There is no visible crisis. Life continues to unfold. We pay the bills. Attend work meetings. Cook, scroll, eat, and argue. But underneath it all, there is the persistent feeling of mental overcrowding.
I have been feeling overwhelmed, I said to my friend on the phone. It felt strange to admit. But what felt stranger was realising that I’d never said this out loud before.
After the call, I thought about how quickly we recognised the feeling in each other, and how wordlessly we understood the causes.
Over the next few days, on listening closer, I started to see signs of the same thing elsewhere. Someone spoke of feeling unusually distracted. Someone else admitted he had become incapable of concentrating deeply for more than a few minutes. A third person said he felt permanently tired despite not doing anything physically strenuous. It appeared to be a somewhat universal complaint.
Then my mother fractured her hand.
At her age, such things acquire enormous significance. The logistics alone can feel daunting. There are multiple doctors to talk to, prescriptions to compare, and recovery must be watched carefully.
Amid it all, I found myself scrolling compulsively on LinkedIn and Instagram. Not reading anything with intent. Not even enjoying it. Just moving endlessly through fragments of other people’s lives.
Career announcements. Opinions. Reels. Success stories. Outrage. Motivation. Noise.
I would look up 20 minutes later with the feeling of having consumed a great deal and absorbed nothing. I felt a certain wooliness of the mind.
Why do we do this? The obvious explanation is that it has become a compulsion. Phones are addictive. Social media is engineered to capture attention. All of which is true. But it also feels incomplete, as an explanation.
The more uncomfortable reality, perhaps, is that many of us are no longer scrolling because we are entertained by the snackiness of the hollow content. We are scrolling because it is easier than sitting uninterrupted with all that weighs on our minds.
There was a time when worry forced a certain kind of focus and introspection. One sat with it, took long walks, or stared into space. The mind circled around the thing and turned it over in one’s mind; which is also a form of coping. Today, the moment discomfort appears, an entire digital universe can be called upon to interrupt it.
Perhaps that is why so many of us feel exhausted despite living relatively comfortable lives. What is tiring us out is likely the clash of a cognitive overload caused by too much information, and the emotional overload that comes from not having faced, processed or addressed any of the day-to-day stressors in our lives.
Between PDFs on WhatsApp, career updates on LinkedIn, videos of war, memes and jokes, political outrage, friends’ holiday photographs, and messages asking “Got a minute?”, the brain is switching emotional registers all day long without ever settling into (or resolving) any one of them. The mind is just forced to open tab after tab after tab, with few getting the attention they deserve, and even fewer being resolved and actively closed.
The strange part is how functional we remain through all this. We show up to work, where we chat, smile and answer emails. We meet deadlines, pick up the laundry, laugh at jokes and make dinner.
Outwardly, life appears intact. Which is why so many assume the problem lies in themselves. They think they are coping badly with normal life. Except, none of this is normal.
A few nights ago, after checking once more if my mother needed anything, I found myself back on Instagram, scrolling past strangers’ opinions and carousels.
Somewhere between worrying about her fractured hand and this scrolling, it occurred to me that maybe this is what being overwhelmed now looks like. Not collapse or disorder. Just the slow erasure of the undistracted mind.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)
