Brendan Higgins

It is not the critic who counts.

The Overlooked Emotion & How I Blame The Internet

Disclaimer I am certainly not a psychologist. I don’t know what I’m talking about, so don’t take anything here as truthful or accurate or even particularly well-researched. These are merely my musings on a topic I feel I’ve observed recently. This also isn’t a personal cry for help - I feel mentally stable and healthy. I just find this topic interesting so I felt like writing something down.

There are lots of articles about digital doom and gloom, or “doom-scrolling” and that’s not necessarily what this article is about, but it has some similarities.

Introduction

Have you ever started something new, or even restarted something you used to do in the past, and suddenly found yourself rapidly unmotivated to continue? That may have been apathy - the lack of feeling, emotion, interest, passion, or concern about something. It’s a state of bleak indifference. Like most emotions, apathy is not binary - you can measure it, but only on a spectrum.

Apathy is a word I feel I don’t hear that often, but you do hear related terms like stress, anxiety, depression, dissociation, and even the hefty derealization thrown around pretty commonly. All these terms and emotions are interrelated in their own specific, overlapping ways; but experts seem to agree that they each have a distinct quality that differentiates one from the other. I think a part of it may be that the term apathy is just not as mainstream in our societal vocabulary.

Apathy, as described above might sound new to you, but most people should be able to relate to the sensation. This should be fairly easy to achieve if you briefly dwell on a task, probably at work or school, that you haven’t been able to complete despite recent efforts. The inability to complete it could be attributed to procrastination, but behind that procrastination may be the dark and unfortunate cloud of apathy.

SAADDD(ness)

For whatever reason, It often feels like a large percentage, especially of younger people, are afflicted with what I’ll call SAADDD…stress, anxiety, apathy, depression, dissociation, and derealization. Let’s define each one just so we’re all on the same page. Especially through the lens of social media these illnesses feel like the norm, rather than the exception, and are even sometimes glorified in a strange, strange way.

  • Stress: A response to demanding or challenging situations. Chronic stress can lead to emotional exhaustion and burnout, which can manifest as apathy towards various aspects of life or work.
  • Anxiety: A feeling of worry, fear, or unease about future events. While anxiety and apathy might seem like opposite emotions, they can coexist. For example, anxiety about failure or uncertainty might lead to apathy as a defense mechanism to avoid potential negative outcomes.
  • Apathy: The state of feeling indifferent, lacking emotion, interest, or concern about something. It can often be associated with mental health conditions like depression or be a reaction to overwhelming stress.
  • Depression: A mood disorder characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and a lack of interest or pleasure in activities. Apathy is often a symptom of depression, where a person experiences a profound lack of motivation or emotional response to things they used to find enjoyable.
  • Dissociation: A coping mechanism in response to trauma or distressing experiences, where a person may disconnect from their thoughts, feelings, memories, or identity. In some cases, dissociation can lead to emotional numbness or apathy as a way to protect oneself from overwhelming emotions.
  • Derealization: A dissociative experience where a person feels disconnected from their surroundings as if everything seems unreal or dreamlike. While derealization itself is not an emotion, it can be triggered by intense stress, anxiety, or trauma, and in turn, contribute to feelings of apathy or emotional detachment.

Some of the most commonly cited reasons for Millennial (Gen Y / Gen Z) SAADDD-ness are as follows: living through the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the never-ending cycle of negative news, mass shootings, racial tensions, European wars, global pandemics, terrorism, non-stop political coverage designed to radicalize and divide us, global warming climate collapse doom-and-gloom, unprecedented levels of inflation, radical housing market prices, microplastics, crushing student debt…

…and yeah…when you put it like that - it does seem a bit depressing, doesn’t it? There are lots of counter-examples to all of these things as well - life in the 21st century is generally better than it was say, 100 years ago, and most certainly 200 years ago. But these types of “step back” mindsets are pretty impossible to grasp when you’re just directly grappling with whatever problems you have in front of you. “First World Problems” as they are often called are still problems for the person experiencing them, even if they are, in the grand scheme of things, not life and death problems (Eg. starvation, disease, etc.).

Regardless, I’m sure at least in many ways the seeming increase in these negative emotions helps explain our also increasing generational drug (ab)use: alcohol, Xanax, Klonopin, Zoloft, Citalopram… SSRIs, Marijuana, and Psychedelics galore! These help dull the SAADDD(ness), or so I’m told / can imagine. I have no personal experience with them. I personally just desperately rely on caffeine.

If you doubt the relative mainstream pervasiveness of “mental health” in the youth just refer to the popularity of “mental health anthem” songs (playlist not exhaustive).

Social Media & Exposure to Instant Expertise and Exceptionalism

Yes, I know the topic of social media and its impact on mental health is discussed all the time. Hell, recently Mark Zuckerberg said “sorry” for his social media platforms and whatever role they may (or may not) have recently played in teenage suicides. So my ramblings here probably won’t be a hot take, but that’s okay. I won’t be discussing celebrity worship, body dysmorphia, bullying, armchair activism, or everyone’s obvious addition to short-form content (Eg. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts) and the instant-gratification / disgustingly satisfying but ultimately disappointingly brief dopamine hits they provide again and again and again like a slot machine that you never win at.

Instead, I want to talk about how the biggest advantage of the internet is also its biggest weakness, and how this wicked problem makes me give up on things before I even get started and is one of my wild theories behind why all the new generations are just so SAADD.

So here’s the theory - The internet provides us with instant expertise. Instant excellence, instant exceptionalism. It’s amazing! And it also completely sucks.

Do you want to learn a language? You can find a polyglot on YouTube who knows 9 giving lessons and surprising native speakers at their traditional restaurants by ordering off the menu in a rare language. How fun!

Do you want to learn to paint or draw? You can find dozens of master artists who make it look effortless and may even offer free online lessons or tutorials.

Do you want to learn an instrument? Here’s a 9-year-old who can play 5 showing you how.

Do you want to play a video game? Here’s a 19-year-old who plays it professionally 18 hours a day making 6-figures a month. If that’s not interesting enough there’s also a guy who beats that one game you’ve been stuck on for months with his feet and a Guitar Hero controller.

Do you want to learn digital photography? Here’s a professional with $100,000 in equipment showing you how to be better.

Do you want to learn to code? Here’s a digital savant who writes assembly in notepad.exe

Want to learn how to play chess? You sweet summer child if you didn’t start practicing at the tender age of 5 you’re already too late.

You want to get into running? Don’t look up David Goggins. Just don’t. Or maybe do. I’m not sure.

Of course, all these things are useful. Incredibly useful actually, or at least incredibly entertaining as long as you’re content being an observer. jnm Except that, they sort of aren’t useful, right? Sometimes, when you start something new, the worst thing to be exposed to is perfection or at the very least excellence. Depending on your own mental resilience and ability to ignore other people - you might find yourself frustrated after watching 23 different painting tutorials and staring down at your ill-formed, muddy canvas that looks nothing like how you had imagined it. You are immediately discouraged, and mentally give in to the idea of your own inferiority.

So here’s the problem I don’t see mentioned often: how is it possible to enjoy being average or even far below average at something when you’re instantaneously exposed to exceptionalism? Being bombarded with expertise isn’t necessarily a good thing for us mentally. Especially when you consider humanity’s subconscious and unstoppably pervasive negativity bias.

For a simple analogy, imagine you decide to venture out and try a martial art. You arrive at the academy and find that it consists of nothing but black belts who have practiced for 10 years. They submit and/or kick your ass without blinking an eye or breaking a sweat. Sure, they’re all really nice about it. Sometimes they even give you a tip or two. But it still doesn’t feel great, does it? A balanced academy would have people at all skill levels. Including new people who join and are, of course, worse than you. In a physical sport, this might work out.

However, in a hobby like drawing or playing the piano, you may never have a “new” person to join you. Your only baseline is that guy on YouTube who draws like Kim Jung Gi or plays like Chopin! Unfortunately, we’re naturally inclined to look outward when we measure our own growth in a subject. Doubly unfortunate, the algorithm of the internet content engine has no interest in showing you someone shitty at something; it instead bombards you with the best. We should of course only measure ourselves against our own previous baseline/personal-best…but that takes discipline. Discipline which we all lack in some form or another.

The Phenomenon of Anemoia: Living without Global Baselines

Sometimes I think about the idea of Anemoia. Now there’s a term even more rare than apathy. Anemoia is the feeling of nostalgia for an era you never personally experienced. Born in the 90’s and feeling nostalgic about the 50’s…like closing your eyes and dreaming in black and white.

Say what you will about it, clearly the idea is more popular now than it was 10 years ago.

You might consider the explosion in freely available internet expertise. In 2010 how many hours of content existed on YouTube vs today? Were those videos filmed on the same quality camera we readily have access to today? It’s comparing a 360p tutorial to a 4k tutorial. The production quality today blows away what we had in 2010.

It’s a unique type of 21st-century apathy. Exposure to experts can set an unrealistically high goal for many people. It leads to a certain inherent imposter syndrome that can be difficult to ignore. The unfortunate reality is that most people probably need more exposure to very average bullshit. Although I’m sure if you asked a young aspiring pianist in 1920 if they’d rather move to Paris, France to find a proper teacher or instantly pull up a full-color talking, moving picture on their magic hand square they’d tell you the magic hand square every time.

I think that’s what makes this unique - we’re so overexposed to the vast quantities of information available at our fingertips that not only do we take It for granted, but it does us some degree of mental harm. This is somewhat ironic of course because “on paper” instant access to high-level expertise should inspire people to make more rapid strides in progress toward achieving their own goals. The problem is, I’m just not convinced that’s what happens.

Bob Ross was a great painter, but he wasn’t good enough to scare you. His techniques were easy but had some depth, and most of all, he embraced the teaching style of “happy little mistakes”… that methodology is not present in 99% of tutorials I’ve ever seen on a subject. I suppose one small takeaway from this rambling is that being an expert in something doesn’t always translate to being a good teacher.

But why did I bring up Anemoia? Because I think some of us often question how hard it would have been to have been the best at something in your hometown in, say, 1935.

Gregory was the undisputed champion baseball player of his town. People still talk about his home run record at the bar years later. A classic Greg Hardy Home Run they’d say!

Imagine if Greg was instead born in 2015, and his home run record was compared against his hometown, the state athletic board, as well as the entire global internet archive of baseball content. Sure, Greg was good, but I’ve seen better before. Did you see that kid in the Dominican Republic? Insane. In a very direct way, we’ve created a system of competition on a global scale.

The leaderboard for the best Tetris score at the local arcade is now online and includes every “professional” Tetris player on the globe. Good luck, local-town-arcade Tetris fans! You’ll never be in the top 100.

I’m the best Rubik’s cube solver in my immediate family. I’m also the only Rubik’s cube solver in my immediate family, so the bar is low. I can solve a scrambled cube in 3-5 minutes or so. It’s pretty mind-blowing when I show this skill off to my nieces and nephews. If only they knew the world record was <5 seconds…In the grand scheme of things, my dumb skill is glacially slow. But is that how I should measure myself? After all, nobody in my immediate circle can do it. I’m #1 🏆!

Sometimes I wonder what the most damaging impacts of this all could be. Yes, you could argue the next great music artist has their motivation smothered in the crib, but what about things that have the potential to impact the globe in more “real” ways? Scientific, engineering, and math prodigies who are disillusioned with their natural abilities because they prematurely judge themselves against the global community of established scientists, engineers, and mathematicians?

Why does it feel like we have fewer breakthroughs in mathematics than we did in the early 20th century? Did math get harder? You could argue yes, it did get harder or at the very least more complex. However, we also have…computers now? In theory, math got easier than ever before. Did people just think more clearly in 1920? Was the inherent boredom of the era helpful? I know Euclid and Archimedes definitely didn’t have anything better to do. What if Einstein had had a backlog of 35 TV shows to binge-watch on Netflix? Would he have bothered to give Relativity any thought? You are NEVER bored in the 21st century. Maybe the boredom and lack of global references allowed people to focus on tasks more than we allow ourselves today.

If you were given a life-or-death mandate to write a novel in 365 days or less would you rather write it in your house/apartment or in a cabin in the woods isolated from society and possibly an internet connection? I would personally take the cabin route…and I’m probably not alone on that choice. Especially when one considers how many famous and influential writers could be added to the list of “authors who self-isolated so they could get some writing done.” Although maybe not…who knows?

Of course, this article isn’t really about the plague of “the internet is so distracting I can’t get my work done” (eg. procrastination enabler), but you could in theory use some sort of website blocker / timer system that gives you a sort of artificial cabin in the woods.

Combating Apathy: Finding Flow Your Flow

In the 1970s, a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studied happiness, creativity, and motivation, came up with a concept called Flow, which is the modeled state of hyperfocus.

The model is pretty simple when you look at it:

Essentially, any task you perform presents you with a challenge, and depending on your skill level, abilities, or general aptitude for the task your mental state will fall into a particular major category for that task. With the “ideal” mental state being “FLOW.”

Unfortunately, this graphic has one flaw, which is that it implies that all these emotions are granted equally at a roughly 12.5% split each (100/8), but I think a “real” breakdown, at least in terms of averages, is more like this:

I also think one thing that the chart overlooks is the interrelated concept of burnout. While you could conflate burnout with boredom, they are in my opinion, different problems with similar features.

A quick and easy example might be playing a video game. If you have never played a video game in your life and someone hands you Dark Souls, you will likely have extremely low abilities and be presented with a high challenge level. Death after death, confused with the controls, and hopelessly lost you almost immediately fall into one of the negative categories on the chart: anxiety, worry, apathy, or boredom. Alternatively, if you present someone who regularly plays 10+ hours of video games a week with a new title, they will likely master it relatively quickly. The trick to making a good game is to make sure that your theme and gameplay mechanics match the average abilities of your target audience. Thankfully, most games come with adjustable difficulty so players can fine-tune their experience in a way that personally maximizes their relative enjoyment of the title. Unfortunately, life doesn’t come with an adjustable difficulty setting.

…However, with enough drive, time, practice, and patience that individual could theoretically beat the game, right?

But…what if 20 minutes into their game experience after dying 15 times on the 1st boss they went to YouTube and discovered that people have beaten the game in less than ten hours with the following: bananas hooked up to electrodes, bongos, DDR dance mats, racing wheels, etc. Here lies the digital disruption of flow.

Regular gamers may know that those are super fringe examples of the average person playing Dark Souls. But boy, that feels pretty demoralizing. When someone is that good at the game, why continue to play? And so the apathy sets in. If you’re a gamer, you’ve been here before. You buy a game, boot it up on Steam, play for a few minutes, and stop playing only to never launch the game again. It isn’t that the game is bad, it’s just that the game didn’t stick right. You were too apathetic to find enjoyment in the activity. Maybe your mind was elsewhere, maybe you were anxious, maybe you just never reached that flow that keeps you coming back. Maybe you died one too many times and looked up a speed run and called it done.

So instead, you just don’t play. Or you boot up Cookie Clicker or Vampire Survivors - games with essentially no skill. You treat games like a fidget spinner rather than a challenge. I find this video topical here, despite its general focus on the pandemic.

One solution to this is of course to stop looking things up. Treat the game like there’s no information about it out there. The same could be said for many hobbies or tasks. Just willingly ignore the internet. It’s hard. Somehow when I was like 10 I beat Morrowind without really using the internet. I don’t know how. I couldn’t do it now as a grown man.

As a final non-video game-related example. Sometimes you hear about how someone isn’t being “challenged” at work. You could view this issue, especially if you are in management, as a flow issue. You do not want an apathetic and bored employee. They’re either a flight risk or unproductive. You also don’t want a stressed-out employee, but perhaps a stressed-out employee is easier to fix than an apathetic one? The trick to people management and maintaining proper employee retention is to balance the flow of the tasks assigned. You want your employees to be challenged but operating within their abilities and be given enough unique tasks to avoid burnout.

Csikszentmihalyi once said: “Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.”

The Conclusion: It’s not easy

It’s not easy accepting that you may just be bad at something. You may be average at it, to begin with, if you’re lucky, but probably not. If you’re exceptionally lucky you might find something you’re naturally inclined to be good at from the start. We all hope for that, but it’s usually rare.

So how do we proceed?

First, keep it simple and stop judging yourself against others. Only measure yourself against your own baselines and progress. Set realistic goals. Instead of fearing failure try to embrace the challenge and focus on the small victories. Don’t fall into the trap of nocebo effects where you let all your consecutive failures “add up” and convicne yourself you’ll never get better or never learn how to do something - convincing yourself you can’t do it is far easier than convicning yourself that you can do it so keep your chin up and try to learn from failure rather than be demoralized by it.

Don’t be afraid to start therapy if you feel like you need it. It’s unsurprisingly quite popular these days, and there are lots of insurance-refundable options, teletherapy, texting therapy, AI therapists, etc. I’ve never gone myself, but I think it’s nice to see the stigma around getting mental health help being slowly eroded in recent years.

Aside from that, I think the most helpful thing is to tell friends and family about my goals. Having someone supportive to share progress and frustrations with is invaluable. The accountability they provide can help keep me on task and schedule.

Heck, even the act of writing is hard. I can’t even count the number of times I started writing this blog post, got down a few sentences or stray thoughts, and then immediately stopped. To put it into perspective, I’ve been writing this blog on/off with large breaks since April 2022.

Why can’t I focus?

Every time I started it was suddenly easier to stop thinking, and stop writing, and simpler to check Reddit, open YouTube, or glance at my phone to see if I had a new notification. My dopamine levels are probably messed up and I don’t even realize it, or at least I won’t admit it.

From the moment I wrote the first word of this article, until the last when was I happiest? Maybe I’ll never be a writing prodigy, but the act of putting myself out there and pushing my limits is kind of rewarding. Imperfect progress is still progress.

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