We Can't Feel Anymore

28th May, 2025

1,210 words•7 min read

emotionspsychologyalexithymiamodern-life

Ask your friends how they're feeling. Watch them pause, look confused, then mumble something generic like "fine" or "stressed."

They're not being evasive. They literally don't know.

You May Ask Why?

Alexithymia, the inability to identify emotions, used to affect 10% of people. Now 76% of depressed teenagers have it. This isn't better diagnosis. It's an epidemic.

Your emotional system evolved for simple threats. Lion equals fear. Stolen food equals anger. Clear signals, clear responses.

Now that same ancient system processes career anxiety, social media feeds, climate change, relationship drama. It's a hammer trying to perform surgery.

Most people's emotional vocabulary: "good," "bad," "stressed." Researchers have mapped hundreds of distinct emotional states. Each carries specific information about what's happening and what to do next.

When you can only detect "something feels off," you miss the actual message. You can't address resentment with the same approach you'd use for overwhelm.

But here's where it gets worse. Technology isn't just failing to help us feel better. It's actively making the problem worse.

Growing Up Without Pause

We don't understand conditioning, especially the cultural kind we grew up with.

In the Indian environment, it's just one thing after another. School, then tuition, then entrance exams, then college, then job, then marriage, then career pressure, then family responsibilities. There's never a moment where you're allowed to just stop, ponder upon the sequence of events that have happened, and ask how they've shaped your worldview.

And now we're adults who can't recognize our own emotional states because we were never taught. Our generation is the first to face this double burden - culturally conditioned to suppress emotions while simultaneously navigating unprecedented tech influences that enhance it, that previous generations never had to deal with.

What is Tech Doing to Us?

Children spending more than 3 hours daily on social media face double the risk of mental health problems. But here's the cruel twist: the less we can identify our emotions, the more we seek external validation through digital platforms.

We're caught in a feedback loop, outsourcing our emotional processing to algorithms designed to maximize engagement, not well-being.

Social media provides emotional shortcuts. Likes for validation. Outrage for connection. Endless scrolling for avoidance. But shortcuts bypass the neural pathways that develop emotional intelligence.

The paradox is striking: 30% of the population experiences chronic loneliness while we're more "connected" than ever. We're social snacking. Browsing profiles without meaningful engagement. Mistaking the illusion of connection for the real thing.

Everyone claims they want emotionally available people in their lives. Yet we've created a culture where people broadcast their feelings but can't actually feel them. We perform emotional labor but lack emotional literacy.

And there's another layer to this crisis. We've destroyed the very conditions our brains need to process emotions in the first place.

Boredom.

The Death of Boredom

Your brain needs downtime to process emotions. We eliminated downtime.

Every moment gets filled with information, decisions, stimulation. The Default Mode Network, your brain's emotional processing system, only activates when you're not focused on external tasks. Constant stimulation keeps it offline.

Anxious? Scroll. Sad? Scroll. Bored? Scroll. Lonely? Scroll.

This isn't just habit - it's conditioning. Apps use variable reward schedules, the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. Sometimes you get a dopamine hit from a notification, sometimes you don't. This unpredictability makes the behavior incredibly hard to break. We've been systematically trained to associate any emotional discomfort with the need for digital stimulation.

We've trained ourselves to reach for our phones the moment any emotional discomfort arises. Face ID eliminated the friction of typing a code. Swiping eliminated the effort of clicking. We can now curate our own echo chamber where anything emotionally challenging gets instantly eliminated.

This systematic removal of friction has led us to a situation where we never learned to tolerate emotional discomfort or process it because we've never had to; we can just change the circumstances to meet our needs. But that strategy falls short in real life.

'Apathy is a tragedy and boredom is a crime' - Bo Burnham

The cruel irony? While we're stumbling blind, the ones on the other side are playing a completely different game and we are losing; because they know the rules and we don't.

The Uneven Playing Field

Tech companies employ teams of psychologists to optimize engagement patterns. A whole research field called Consumer Psychology is emerging - the study of how emotions, perceptions, and cognitive biases influence purchasing decisions and behavior patterns. It examines everything from color psychology in interfaces to the timing of notifications that maximize engagement.

I am not saying it's evil. This is the natural course of technological progress - tools become more sophisticated at understanding human behavior. In the attention economy, when multiple platforms are competing for the same 24 hours everyone has, optimizing for human attention becomes inevitable. The challenge isn't malicious intent, but rather that when we don't understand the rules of the game, the playing field becomes fundamentally uneven.

The solution isn't to avoid technology. It's to level the playing field by understanding how we actually work, so that we can recognize these influences in real-time.

The Dev-Brain Logic Trap

This is something that I experienced personally. And dev brain makes it worse.

When you spend years training your mind to think in binaries and solve problems with logic, you apply that same framework everywhere. Everything becomes either good or bad. Everything bad is a problem that needs fixing. More is always better than less, so everything needs full optimization.

Dev brain sees emotions as obstacles to clear thinking rather than information worth processing. While we're busy trying to optimize why you feel something or 'fix' it, we miss what it's actually telling us.

Emotions just follow different rules than optimization. They're information systems that evolved over millions of years to help us navigate social relationships and survival threats; not a problem that needs fixing. It's a feature, not a bug. Research shows that emotions are functional and that even actions or biases that seem irrational or non-optimal at first glance might serve some broader need for adaptation.

And when we learn to read that information instead of fighting it, everything changes.

Life gets a lot easier.

What Can We Do About it

We have a crisis of emotional intelligence. Everyone says it's good, and nobody's talking about it in practical terms or how to develop it.

As people learning to navigate systems that were never designed for our well-being, rebuilding emotional literacy is more important than ever.

That will only happen when we go back to the whiteboard and understand how we work. And that is the objective of Subjective See.

Emotions, but for the nerds