Bits of Emotions
We live in a time where seeing too much has made us feel too little.
What you’re about to read is a reflective and philosophical essay on modern society about how algorithms, habits, and overstimulation reshape our emotions, our instincts, and our sense of authenticity.
One thing I can understand well this days is saying no or avoiding direct social interactions. This it may sound weird but It’s actually not, it is direction our modern ways of interaction drives us to. No wonder we lose interest in them after being constantly exposed to social stimulation on our phones and not only.. Of course, digital and personal interactions are very different; but it seems our brain doesn’t fully recognize that difference. It reacts the same way: overwhelmed, exhausted, and too tired to make a healthy decision.
What happens is that over time, this exhaustion has built something strange inside us, you can called it addiction, and it fits very well but I see it more like an algorithm of the self . An algorithm not written in code, but carved in dopamine, habit, and repetition, of chemicals and behavior Each time we scroll, like, or comment, we train this inner system which starts acting like on its own, pushing us to repeat what once felt good, whether we want to or not. We act not out of will anymore , but out of some sort of programming, by something that carved our behavior and reaction to suit it own interests, made by what we see too often, by what the platforms feed us.
No wonder how difficult it is to resist this urge, because the entire environment is designed to keep us stimulated. The noise, the notifications, the endless like and respond to something or someone. (And I say something because we all know this someone could be not even a real person). They all play into the same cycle: dopamine drives habits, and habits exist to seek more dopamine. It’s a loop, one that feels like choice but behaves like compulsion.
It’s something like this: if you don’t care what you see, you don’t care what you believe.
I’m not a neuroscientist, nor am I trying to be one. I am just someone trying to make sense of a world that moves faster than we can emotionally process it.
And on top there’s another layer; those “entities” within us. Consciousness, instinct, emotion, reason. They coexist, argue, and negotiate every action we take. But what happens when one of them, the instinct, for example, is constantly contradicted by the world we’ve built?
For millennia, our survival depended on social bonds. To belong was to stay alive. Isolation meant danger, even death. But now, we live in an age that constantly overloads those same instincts. We’re oversaturated with connection, flooded with virtual interactions that mimic social closeness while draining our emotional energy. So, paradoxically, the more we connect online, the more we withdraw offline.
It’s not surprising that so many minds react chaotically to this. Our instincts were built for tribes, not timelines. The code written in our genetics, the one that made us seek faces, voices, touch is now forced to live inside a world of screens, avatars, and endless noise. No wonder so many of us are mentally exhausted, anxious, or detached.
We call it progress. But maybe, somewhere between the dopamine hits and the algorithms, we’ve stopped asking who is really making the decisions; us, or the systems we’ve built inside and outside ourselves.
We try to teach machines or programs emotions while we ourselves slowly unlearn them.
But what they produce is only emotion by imitation, emotion by prediction,
emotion without a heartbeat.
A.O. Homorodean
Putting a subscribe or share button under a piece about emotional overload felt absurd, so I didn’t.
Well, except for the ones Substack automatically includes.