Hi, my name is Tristan and I am a stimulation addict. How did this come to happen?

I recently finished Faster by James Gleick. The narrative was fairly chaotic (hehe) and unfocused, but the truth is I failed to understand the lesson until it was made explicit: we've lost the pauses in daily life.

Perhaps this is because the ideology of our time has made this intensification invisible to me. It reminds me of how Zizek described the sunglasses in They Live: they must be put on in order to see the truth, as opposed to something that must be removed (blinders, the pill from Equilibrium, etc.). In order to see what was happening in front of my face, I needed to learn to see it.

In the past, there was what we now call "free time" or what used to be called "leisure time," in other words time spent doing nothing. Today, we long for free time: so where did it all go?

The availability of endlessly stimulating activities for cheap chemically reacted with the relentless human craving for stimulation, to produce an in-hindsight all-to-easy-to-not-foresee future in which we're all desperate to reduce our stimulation while continuing to see just how much stimulation we can possibly experience.

Considering the drug addict, the current horror of TikTok is nowhere near the end of the line. Stimulation will continue to develop until at par or superior to (or probably in coincidence with) drugs.

I'm reminded of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where drugs and toys are used together to produce an experience more stimulating than the misery of life in the colonies. The plot here may be prophetic (give PKD some credit..): Can-D is about to be outcompeted by the even more stimulating drug Chew-Z. The development towards increasing stimulation marches onwards.

As for me, I struggle with idleness. I often think to myself, I wish I could pick up a new hobby, but where would I find the time for it? And yet at the same time, looking at the results of a day gone by, I find that much time has been "wasted" in stimulating but "nutrition-less" activities. Junk activities. Empty activities. High on information.

I needn't feel alone: according to a study in the book, people when asked about an average day report reading for 30 minutes a day, but when asked about yesterday, respond that they did not read at all. Where did the time go?