Dr David Cliff reflects upon how our obsession with expression has left us more disconnected than ever.
Mental health problems are now so common they are constantly referred to in the news. Every major event is reported through the prism of emotion. The journalist’s first question is no longer what happened but how did you feel when it did? We have moved from fact to feeling as our dominant form of meaning.
Therapy culture and social media have joined forces to make public disclosure the new virtue. We are urged to “share,” “open up,” “express,” yet our emotional fluency has become a spectacle. The vaccine debates and endless waves of intersectional outrage online show how easily emotion now shapes public truth.
How experience is framed matters. It can enlighten, misinform and evoke fear and hatred. Evolution made us alert to danger, so bad news attracts attention. Good news feels like a distraction from our programmed vigilance. But our chronic focus on threat is exhausting; it feeds anxiety while posing as realism.
Mental health has also become professionalised. Informal care – the neighbourly ear or family conversation – has given way to referral and liability. We increasingly outsource empathy to experts. Society has become a crowd of spectators watching its own distress, eager to comment but hesitant to connect.
In this climate, success replaces meaning. The market defines value, and those who live quietly or modestly are cast as underachievers. Social media magnifies the hierarchy. It was meant to connect us; instead, it isolates, radicalises, and rewards performative outrage. The screen, not the self, increasingly decides who we are.
Technology both enables and impoverishes us. Young people fluent in texting may struggle with conversation. Many workplaces report staff unwilling to call clients – safer to email than risk a human exchange. The very tools that promise connection drain our capacity for presence.
Freedom of speech is narrowing too. Ordinary opinions can now attract legal or social punishment, while real crime may receive less police attention. People censor themselves not from civility but fear of having an opinion that will offend or prompt threat. The paradoxical result is an expressive society that quietly represses the individual.
Children are raised on tablets and influencers proffer guidance from charisma instead of character. They learn that confidence sells better than competence.
Those who profit from this attention economy shape identity as entertainment.
Meanwhile, technological change races ahead. Artificial intelligence, once futuristic, now reorganises work within months. Whole professions are being redefined. The few who master these systems gain extraordinary power; the rest are left attending catch-up seminars. Economic evolution has become revolution.
As the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis observes, we are sliding toward ‘technofeudalism’. Data is the new land; our attention, the rent. We volunteer our privacy and time to platforms that shape our desires and feed our fears. The reward is belonging – the punishment, obscurity.
So we scroll, post, and perform. We fear missing out more than losing ourselves. We fear the opinions of others even more (FOPO). In chasing connection, we have lost community; in expressing everything, we have said almost nothing.
The real crisis isn’t only mental health – it’s existential. We have become so busy articulating feelings that we’ve forgotten how to feel them, so obsessed with connection that we’ve forgotten how to relate.
What crisis? Ours. The one we no longer have time to notice.
gedanken.co.uk