Why Do Young People Feel So Numb?
How modern life has trained us to consume suffering and flatten our emotions
We’ve all felt it. We open our phones to a barrage of horror — children starved and bombed, our own rights revoked — and we feel nothing. The feeling is not new.
“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” So opens Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in 1915. The image medicalises the sky and anaesthetises the landscape, turning the cosmos into a body incapable of feeling. This is Prufrock: hyper-aware, hyper-articulate, incapable of action. He has “measured out [his] life with coffee spoons” and does not “dare to eat a peach.”
In Capitalist Realism (2009), Mark Fisher invokes Eliot’s argument that “tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested.” We inhabit, Fisher says, a culture of repetition and dead time, no longer alive. Writing a century apart, both diagnose a civilisation that has lost the capacity to feel its way forward.
If Prufrock was already etherised in 1915, what does it mean to call numbness a feature of life today? My argument is that the conditions producing it have intensified and become pharmacologically, technologically, and aesthetically managed in ways earlier modernity could not have imagined. Under neoliberalism, numbness has developed from a symptom of modernity into its preferred default mode.
Numbness today is tripartite. It is a symptom (produced by structural conditions), an aesthetic (circulated as style, sound, silhouette), and a strategy (chosen by those for whom feeling is dangerous). The three are inseparable. Aesthetic numbness sells the symptom back as style; strategic numbness is subsumed into the aesthetic; the symptom is reframed as personal choice.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche describes the figure who terrifies him most. Not the villain, not the nihilist, but the Last Man — comfortable, risk-averse, mildly amused, modestly medicated against discomfort. “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” the Last Man asks, and he blinks. The same gesture Dizzee Rascal will describe 120 years later from an East End tower block: “My eyes don’t move left or right, they just blink.” For Nietzsche, the Last Man is who we become when comfort eliminates the conditions for struggle or true feeling. In part we have become him. Not for lack of struggle, but because of how total our manufactured consent has become. Our outrage is contained before we can act. When we have no hope, feeling is futile.
Emily Dickinson, writing after the Civil War’s mass death, suggested “After great pain, a formal feeling comes — / The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.” She names the body “Mechanical” fifty years before Taylorist factories made the metaphor fact. Her numbness is a defensive structure, not an absence of feeling: “The Loneliness One dare not sound.” To recognise it would be to let it engulf her. Dickinson wrote from seclusion, refusing the literary marketplace that would have got its paws on her work.
Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) sees the living as already dead: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” In The Hollow Men, the post-war generation is “Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” The modernist numbness Eliot defined was, in part, the residue of mass trauma for which there was no language.
However, you could argue, maybe our numbness is just realism. Maybe people don’t act because action doesn’t truly work. But this is exactly where our moment differs from every prior one. For most of history, the lag between collective will and visible change was enormous: petitions took years to circulate, movements took decades to cohere, and a person could reasonably feel their lifetime was too short to see the result of their effort. That lag has now collapsed. The internet has compressed the machinery of change to near-instantaneous speed: information propagates globally in hours, coordination that once required years of pamphleteering happens in an afternoon, and a cause can reach saturation before a week is out. The mechanisms have been accelerated so radically that if mass feeling were going to translate into structural change, it would, by now, have done so. The infrastructure for it exists and runs at full tilt. Its persistent failure to deliver is not a problem of speed or reach.
The missing variable is who participates. Historically, the tipping point for political change has rarely been the most oppressed acting alone. It has been the moment the middle class joins them, lending numbers, resources, and a stake the state can’t ignore. And this is precisely what reflexive impotence forecloses. The comfortable-enough majority, the people with rent to pay and a face to keep smooth, are the ones most thoroughly anaesthetised and most expensively invested in not feeling. The very group whose participation has historically tipped the balance is the group the system has most successfully numbed. So the machinery spins at full speed and the one input that would move it never arrives.
By the mid-2000s, British electronic music had built a sonic vocabulary for this condition, just as neoliberalism reached maturity. Burial’s records sound like London after everyone has gone home: vinyl crackle, rain, distant sirens, RnB love confessions stripped of context and made to grieve themselves. His music is the texture of the post-rave comedown, drawing you into a tension with no catharsis. Fisher reads him as the exemplary hauntological artist, mourning our “lost futures.” (Check out their interview here).
But Dizzee Rascal got there first. Boy in da Corner opens: “I’m just sittin’ here, I ain’t sayin’ much I just think / My eyes don’t move left or right, they just blink.” His thinking has become a trap: “I think too deep and I think too long.” He knows why… a nostalgia for foreclosed futures: “it was only yesterday, life was a touch more sweet.” This is hauntology before Fisher, written when Dizzee was just sixteen.
Little Simz indicts the structure directly on ‘Angel’: the system doesn’t care “if your mental is on the brink of somethin’ dark / as long as you’re cuttin’ somebody’s payslip.” Dave, on his last album, folds two senses of occupation, wage labour and military rule, into one bind (“Afraid to speak [because] I don’t want it risking my occupation / We got kids under occupation, my parents, they wouldn’t get that”): to speak of the second risks the first. His silence is materially enforced. Numbness is the rational response of someone with rent to pay. And yet he offers a counter: “It’s a process / Gotta stand and protest / [Because] they want man silenced / [Because] they want man dead or they want man hopeless.” Action is obligatory, even from inside despair.
What is capitalist realism? The sense that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Young people suffer a reflexive impotence: they know things are bad and that they cannot change them, and their depression is recast as a private mental-health crisis rather than a structural diagnosis. As Fisher asks: “how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”
The rapper Ceebo names the result. Gen Z, he says on ‘Blair Babies,’ are “engendered by a feeling of hopelessness in the face of a world built and shaped before our input.” The movements that might have organised collective feeling were defeated before we were born. The consolation prize is “constant consumption… Few of us recognise that this is not a life.”
Byung-Chul Han describes us as neoliberal subjects who willingly self-exploit in pursuit of self-realisation, turning our bodies, relationships, and biographies into assets to be optimised. When optimisation fails to deliver the promised life, we read it as personal inadequacy rather than a systemic impossibility. Numbness becomes a way of carrying that shame.
The attention economy is its architecture. We are attention mines; numbness is the by-product of extraction. The infinite scroll is a slot-machine reinforcement schedule ported to our phones, engineering the engaged-numb hybrid that defines us: captured attention, almost no feeling, time disappearing while the eyes blink. The technology now industrialises what Dizzee described by hand.
Then the pharmacology. Botox literally paralyses our expressive musculature, and because the face is a part of affect’s feedback loop, freezing it partially freezes the feeling. This is now sold to young people as “preventative.” Ozempic, beyond weight loss, suppresses desire itself: the blockbuster drug of our time treats not sadness but wanting. In ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation,’ Moshfegh’s narrator — young, wealthy, beautiful, the demographic for whom late capitalism should be most tolerable — sedates herself through an entire year. Even with every advantage, she has no life worth being awake for. And the diagnosis itself has become a product: a paperback on the bedside table.
Audre Lorde famously declared “your silence will not protect you.” Is that still true, when millions have protested the genocide in Gaza and nothing has meaningfully changed? Numbness here splits in two. For marginalised people punished for expressivity — the “angry Black woman,” the autistic person masking until burnout — strategic flatness is a survival tactic and a real refusal. Glissant called it the “right to opacity”: the numb face is the face that will not be read by power. But when numbness becomes permanent rather than a mask, it stops being resistance and becomes the success of the conditions that imposed it. So: is numbness inherent to modernity? Yes, mostly. Industrial labour, urban anonymity, the death of meaning, the colonisation of inner life by the market…these structurally produce affective flattening, and neoliberalism has intensified them into a system that sells numbness as wellness and depends on the quiescence it enables. But numbness is not undifferentiated. We feel flat where political feeling would be useful — voting, solidarity, class anger — and hyperstimulated where consumer feeling is profitable: outrage cycles, fandom, culture wars. This is the system working as designed.
The risk is not individual unhappiness. It’s that a population trained to flatten its expectations, smooth its face, and silence its appetites cannot organise against the conditions producing the numbness. Reflexive impotence becomes a self-stabilising loop.
I end with three voices across 140 years. Nietzsche: the Last Man has invented happiness and blinks, the prophecy fulfilled in administered, pharmacological form. Eliot: the patient is still on the table; the diagnosis was correct and the treatment never came. Dave: “It’s a process / Gotta stand and protest.” The diagnosis and the refusal have to coexist. I’m writing this essay from inside the condition I’m describing, as someone who has scrolled and listened to Burial and wondered, like Dizzee at sixteen (only a year younger than me), why the eyes only blink, and who, in writing it, refuses to let that be the last word. The question is no longer whether numbness is inherent to modernity. It manifestly is. The question is what we are willing to do from inside it, knowing the inside is where everything has to be done from. We have to stop accepting it.
This is sik