I’ve been reading bits from Capitalist realism and The burnout society.
Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism argues that attention difficulties like ADHD are systemic products of a culture built around constant stimulation. He describes the “privatisation of stress” as the way collective problems get returned to the individual to manage alone, usually through medication or self-management. His framing felt relevant to my own experience, particularly around medication access. I’ve been unable to get hold of ADHD medication for almost a year. Fisher’s argument that this kind of struggle is political rather than personal has been useful to sit with.
Fisher also describes “depressive hedonia” as a state defineinability to do anything except pursue pleasure. That’s a pretty accurate description of what doomscrolling feels like, constant stimulation seeking as all other stimuli become gradually less engaging.
In Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society, it’s argued that “deep boredom” unoccupied, directionless attention is a necessary precondition for creative thought, and that it’s being systematically eliminated by constant digital stimulation. This feels relavent to my personal experience of getting caught upo in cycles of procrastination and burnout, the quiet moments necessary for creative thought are encroached on before they can develop into anything. He describes hyperattention as “an extremely passive form of doing” where you’re not actively engaging with anything, you’re just unable to resist the next stimulus arriving. That framing of scrolling as passivity was interesting to me and resonated with my experience.
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