Whenever people are involved in debates about politics, economics, and anything that touches upon the state of our world, there is a type of energy you can learn to identify, in others and especially yourself, which allows you to not be pulled by the drama of the conversation, and instead allows you to consciously step in or out of the interaction if you so wish.
This energy is characterized by a frantic need to defend one's ideas, as if one is existentially threatened by the possibility that other people might disagree with them. This is usually accompanied by various tendencies which reinforce a feedback loop of drama: catastrophizing the situation, downplaying the other side's ideas, accusing them of being stupid or even evil, and more generally, focusing on isolated and abstract issues which are necessarily divisive, because we make decisions given our usual set of contexts, and not in some mental ether of formal problems.
All of this results in an atmosphere which is not appropriate for open and clear-headed conversations, but rather leads to strawmanning, polarization, a felt tension in the room, and a state of dissociation for those engaged in the discussion, a lack of presence and anchoring in the moment.
Dissociation here refers to an inability to ground in the sensations of the body, and to be connected with the experience which arises from them: the entire length of one’s spine, the rhythm of one’s breath, the fingers tapping on a keyboard, the screen being used to display these words, a screen significantly smaller than the entire panorama of one’s visual field, and the sense of space in the rest of the room, bounded by a floor, a ceiling and the walls.
Understanding dissociation is important because it is the enemy of clear thinking, because it is impossible to analyze a situation with impartiality if you feel threatened by something in it, or if you are acting from a place of reactivity. Dissociation is more often than not a subconscious attempt to flee from the situation at hand, which is why it is very often driven by, and leads to more, fear and restlessness, none of which are conclusive to living consciously, and thinking clearly about more abstract and wider problems in society.
Dissociation also kills intimacy with other people, because the latter is based on presence, the soft and attuned attention that allows us to see beauty in what is around us, as opposed to scanning our environment for threats.
Dissociation does not merely result from a lack of attention to the isolated elements of our embodied experience. Rather, it manifests as an inability to orient towards unity, namely the unity of the situation at hand, which is why it is so problematic. The experience of space for a dissociated person, to the extent that they experience it at all, is one of atomized objects, the inner reality of the schizoid, 1 an intense focus on separate bits of reality, without any coherence to one another, without any harmony to unite the parts, similar to one of Hieronymus Bosch's depictions of Hell.
Another way to think of it is that the schizoid lives on the screen of their mind, never fully present in the room with other people, but instead engaging with the world the same way they would play a video game: at a distance, as if they were controlling an avatar, as opposed to being in the world. This is most noticeable when the person in front of us is dissociated. Looking into their eyes, it feels like a presence or aliveness is missing, like their gaze is empty, like their attention is somewhere else somehow, while their body has been left behind sitting there, inert and staring in one direction.
In many cases, dissociation is a response to overwhelm, a combination of the freeze and flight responses from the 4Fs model. 2 The body becomes numb while the mind is busy with figuring out problems, or simply distracting itself. This is why people who are routinely dissociated experience the world through a laser-like, narrow focus, because they are scanning their environment for threats, even when they are in the safety of their own room and looking at a screen, because their body does not feel safe.
This is also why intense forms of exercising can exacerbate the symptoms of dissociation rather than alleviate them, because the intensity is often too overwhelming for those prone to dissociation, which compels them to blast music in their ears and tense their body to complete the reps, as opposed to feeling the sensations in their body as they are exercising, and develop their mind-body connection in that manner.
Exercising is useful in the process of recovery, because deliberate exposure to intense sensations is a great way to train one’s ability to be present even under difficult circumstances, but by and large in the modern world, our ability to feel significantly lags behind our ability and willingness to do things. For many of us, our mind has become a tyrant with an obsessive need for control and very little regard for the reality of our body, which is why so many ambitious people are plagued with health problems of all kinds, such as burnout, digestive issues, back pains, repetitive strain injuries (RSI) or heart problems.
Returning to screens, the reason why they disrupt our ability to be embodied is because they force us to remain motionless while our mind is fixated on a narrow slice of information which we focus all of our attention on. Because they can be so much more engrossing than books, through their visuals, animations, music and gameplay, they are much better at capturing our attention, rendering it more narrow and 'flat' over time, such that we experience Reality only through our eyes, becoming spatial beings who are out of touch with time. 3
This explains two common symptoms of heavy screen usage. The first one is the nerd neck, and in general bad posture, which is a result of the narrowing of attention, the way in which people become dissociated from their surroundings, and become a head floating on top of a body that they have to drag around.
Most of the attempts at correcting posture fail to recognize that poor posture arises as the result of various feedback loops, which include our attention and ability to be embodied, and that the “correct” shape cannot be forced into place, because the posture we adopt is (roughly) the optimal shape given the way we use our body and mind. Which is to say, you cannot use a top-down approach to correct the ways in which you are not feeling or seeing something. Posture is corrected through not only stretching and strengthening the right muscles, but also expansive awareness, which allows the spine to feel long, the shoulders to open up, the pelvis to be relaxed, the fingers to feel connected to the hand, to the arm, and to the rest of the body, and the eyes to perceive the entire scenery, rather than fixate and stare on isolated objects.
Following on that, the second symptom of heavy screen usage is myopia. It is not that screens directly make us myopic, but that they encourage a narrow form of attention which makes our eyes tunnel vision, unable to perceive the wide panorama of our entire visual field, a narrowing which is worsened by wearing glasses, since they do not cover the periphery of our vision.
This narrow attention is moreover compounded with the habitual tension we feel when we are looking at a screen, because tense and tired eyes are worse at seeing clearly, as anyone who has tried to work while they were under time pressure can attest. Poor eyesight is not merely the result of “genes”, it is the direct consequence of a narrow attention and a buildup in tension in our eyes, which makes them unable to relax.
It takes time to undo the process, which requires a combination of eye exercises to retrain how one uses their eyes, full-body relaxation, posture adjustments, and even broader lifestyle changes such as changing how one walks, one how eats, and how much sunlight one is getting. 4
It is not just our screens which favor narrow attention however, because our entire world rewards and perpetuates it. Take school for instance, which forces young children full of energy and curiosity to sit still in a chair and pay attention to dry lessons for eight hours a day, an experience which prepares them for the same type of motionless numbness found in all office jobs.
Instead of learning like how human beings have done for hundreds of thousands of years, which is to say directly from their environment, children are forced to learn through the mediation of textbooks and teachers, a process which happens entirely in the mind, with no regard whatsoever to the full embodied intelligence of the body.
Predictably, children do not tolerate the experience of schooling very well, particularly those who are very spontaneous, curious, and intelligent (in the only way that is meaningful to talk about it: the intelligence to adapt to the situation, rather than the pseudo-intelligence required to fit in unnatural institutions). This is why the education system has over the past decades found ways to identify those who tend to cause troubles, and created an entire library of "medical" terms was created to put the blame on the children rather than the institution. As a result, if a child doesn't care about the tedious lessons she is forced to listen to, and would prefer to do anything but that, she is said to have an attention deficit disorder. If another child struggles to comply to authority and is frequently in an irritable mood, he is said to have an oppositional defiant disorder. 5
(The way in which institutions have their own internal requirements, which individuals are helpless to meaningfully change and have to obey them is part of a larger trend in society which will be discussed at length in a later part.)
Returning to narrow attention, our societies are atomized in a way that navigating them require us to live from that state more often than not. Modern life forces us to drive cars, which channels our attention through the screen of their windshield, narrowly focused on what is in front of us and where we want to go, dehumanizing other drivers on the road, and making us unable to really take the scenery of anything we pass by. Not that there is anything particularly beautiful we might find in a modern city, where buildings are built with utilitarian aims in mind, where nature is confined to a few parks here and there, with nothing wild allowed to grow, and where the art is confined to a few museums scattered throughout the city, again, a process of atomization.
The same is true with all institutions and all bureaucracies. The hospital doesn’t help anyone to be healthy in any important sense, instead it manages symptoms and collects data about your body. Have you ever had the experience of sitting in front of a doctor who pays more attention to what is on their computer than to your actual body? In modern medicine, the body is seen as a machine which we can dissect into discrete parts and study separately, which is why chronic illnesses which cannot be neatly located in one specific area are so prevalent in our times, and why very little can be done about them within the paradigm of modern western medicine.
It is not just the digital screens that so many spend much of their time on which shape us, down to our posture and our ability to see and feel, but even the screen of the mind, which brings about the world of institutions and machines, where everything is atomized and studied separately from its context. Such a world has no use for the unity of embodiment, or the unity of the context, as long as it is kept running at least, because this process of atomization also leads to its utter inability to recognize its lack of sustainability and deal with the context at hand, the same way that a dissociated mind leads to the total exhaustion of the body it is trying to control.
The reason why I have started this series with this piece on somatic hazards, the aspects of our society that rupture our connection to our body, is because agitation propaganda (agit-prop) has become so widespread that anyone endeavoring to navigate our world consciously must be aware of it and take adequate measures. Agit-prop is a very common pitfall which afflicts many writers who wish to discuss (existentially) difficult subjects. It is not merely restricted to the news channels which are only interested in profits, and who have figured out that outrage and fear spread a lot better than good journalism, although it is a notable problem of course. It is also a common trap of activism and any writer who wishes to see the world change for the better, and who recognizes that people need to change to address the fundamental issues in our world.
Take for instance the tone behind environmentalism. While many turn to activism because they wish to make modern society more sustainable by making people more aware of the externalities that it engenders, in practice it runs into the fundamental problem that the people with the most power can afford to simply not care about the consequences of their actions, because power also affords people to not have skin in the game—in the short term at least. What this means is that environmentalism, and activism in general, reliably devolves into a game of outrage and finger pointing at the evil capitalists, often weaponizing dissociation to get more people on its side.
This is because dissociation is often the pre-condition for invalidating someone's truth. What we sense with our body can be prone to misinterpretation, but what we experience is undeniable, and is more fundamental than the knowledge that our mind derives from it. I might wrongly conclude that the glance she threw on the side meant that she wasn't interested in what I was saying, but the fact that she looked elsewhere and that I noticed it were both real experiences, regardless of what I extrapolate from that. On a more subtle level, if I consistently feel tense in my stomach before making a call to my parents, this is again an undeniable experience, even if the interpretation and explanation for that phenomenon can be wildly inaccurate.
Our world has next to no need for what we could call somatic truth, being in tune with the sensations of your body, noticing that your throat feels tense around some people and relaxed around others, that you have a way of rounding your shoulders when working on the computer, that you wake up already feeling anxious at the perspective of going to work, or more subtly, that your attention often narrows down when reading words on a screen, and that you do not feel the space between your head and the screen. The reason why somatic truth is so consistently ignored is because our world is, for the most part, ruled by power and unconscious momentum, not conscious qualities such as sensitivity, empathy, freedom, peace or love.
Decisions in companies are not guided by sensitivity or love, they are driven by utilitarian means such as making more money, making processes more efficient, and requiring less labor from people. Likewise, decisions in the law system are constrained by the need to make legible and universally applicable rules that people need to follow no matter the context. Our society is ruled by systems which, by their very nature, ignore the context at hand and instead follow incentivze structures and enforce a set of principles onto the given situation, both of which are counter to the conscious qualities mentioned above which can only arise from the moment.
How does one know that what they did is right or wrong? Or that one feels compelled to pursue a certain path in life? Or that one loves a given person? Philosophy used to be about asking and answering those questions, but modern philosophy has largely departed from asking those altogether, because the source of the answer, consciousness grounded in the body, is completely absent in intellectuals and anyone who is comfortable in the modern world.
We are told nowadays that morality is entirely subjective, because what people believe is right or wrong is based on what they have been raised by, and what their society tells them to believe in. The idea that there could be such a thing as real morality, built on embodied empathy, is deemed absurd, and yet, what other source could there be for morality than the ability to feel someone else's pain from within? Abstract principles that the mind creates out of Reality are good at ... convincing the mind, but they certainly don't have a very good track record at developing our sensitivity to others, and our capacity to be courageous in order to act in the world, for the very fact that rigid laws create an incentive to sidestep them, they never push people towards becoming more sensitive, because nothing can force someone to do so, it has to arise from within.
All of this can sound rather abstract and disconnected from the topic at hand, but it points to a fundamental reality: that conscious qualities such as empathy, curiosity and freedom, are all rooted in experience, not knowledge, and that agitation propaganda mainly acts on the former, not the latter.
To see this in another context, school is so problematic for the development of young children, not because they might learn this or that concept the "wrong" way, but because school, and all institutions in fact, rupture their connection to their embodied truth, and most tragically, the simple truth of wanting to learn more about the world, directly and not in a classroom, as I have mentioned above.
This is why anyone who is in touch with their inner child despairs at the result of long years of schooling. We see those young and playful children excited to move around and explore their environment, ask questions we might have never thought of, delight in the simplest things, and after some time spent in schooling, most of those qualities are gone, beaten out of them over many long gruelling years of submission to an authority. Their flame extinguished by a teacher who doesn't have access to their soul, and believes that the quest for the "right answer" is the most important thing, when in reality it only produces a series of automatons who can serve our alienated society.
Dissociation then, in the context of the news, politics and activism, prevents us from being grounded in our own somatic truth, and instead forces us to contend with realities we cannot directly perceive, and can only interact with through mediated means.
There is no way to be in touch with the Reality of the events presented to us in the news, whether it relates to warfare, or environmental problems, or socio-economic issues. There is always a series of intermediaries that have to be on the ground, focus on the important information, communicate it to their peers, until this long chain of intermediaries reaches us, at which point, it is impossible to tell what is factual from what is an interpretation. Even the people with the best of intentions necessarily process Reality through frames and interpretations, this is how the mind works, but of course the additional problem in an atomized society is there is essentially no such thing as a neutral intermediary.
One problem which results from this is that people present their arguments as if they were grounded on an ironclad "rational" basis, when in fact they are incredibly emotional. Think for instance of the people worried about environmental destruction and who will do everything they can to try to convince those around them to pay attention to the issue.
It's not that they are factually wrong, there are indeed very good reasons to expect that the technological system will not meaningfully change and will keep destroying ecosystems as long as it is able to grow and maintain itself. The problem here is that their way of orienting towards our society and what people can do about it comes from panic, which then makes them rationalize subtler forms of manipulation because of their desperate need to convince others of what they see. How could you trust someone who is constantly anxious about everything? Again it doesn't mean that they are factually wrong, but it certainly means that there is something off about how they approach change.
It's precisely because I am part of the "doomer" side of the conversation that I feel the need to have a discussion on dissociation and subtler forms of coercion, because activism, despite being built on good intentions, is now an incredibly toxic force, one which is moreover unable to solve the very same problems it tries to tackle.
Any vision of a better world must be built on consciousness and how to create conditions that allow it to flourish. It is not acceptable to use subtle forms of coercion to force people to change their behavior, because that does not lead to lasting change.
Activism does not make people more responsible, instead it floods them with guilt, anxiety, and a sense of powerlessness, while the system at large remains the same. Real change needs to be grounded in consciousness, because only conscious people can change. Unconscious people repeat the same scripts over, and over again. It is possible to constrain someone, such that they can't do a certain action, which is what our legal system does, and what a great deal of parents do with their children: punish them for bad grades, prevent them from being on their phone or their computer, that kind of stuff.
Such actions can of course be useful in the short term, but they do not change the person in any meaningful way. A teenager who is forbidden from being on the computer unless they have good grades will not develop a taste for dilligence, patience, or learning, instead they will do whatever it takes to get the good grades—memorize, cheat perhaps—and return to their usual distractions once the parent relaxes their constraints. As soon as that teenager grows up to be an adult and starts living on their own, the lack of virtue will show up in their inability to work, or do anything difficult, unless someone punishes him for not working, which is hardly healthy.
Coercion, no matter how subtle it is, ultimately creates internal fractures, which disrupt someone's internal cohesion. If you punish someone for being on their phone, they will likely look for some other way to distract themselves. Punishment does not address the fundamental reason of why they engage in that behavior, and in fact, the punishment actively incentivizes those people to not look at their patterns, because it instills shame and judgement, rather than promote observations.
Coercion also creates an internal fracture on the side of those who are doing it. They have to resolve the basic reality that those they are wielding their power on are also human beings, which has led to the entire ideological project of the right-wing, and its attempts to "rationally" justify dominance and outrageous inequality.
On the side of activism, the self-deception is centered around the load-bearing idea that the activist sees themselves as an inherently good person who can do no wrong, which justifies why their tactics at manipulation and pulling on people's heartstrings are fine. "I am a good person, but the world will not listen to me unless I use those shady tactics, but the ends justify the means."
This highlights the dual nature of evil in the right-wing and the left-wing: the former tends to be far more obvious, domineering, unashamed, which leads to all the monsters at the top that we are well aware of, the ones that hoard most of the resources for themselves and abuse others. If the motto of the right-wing monsters is "no one can get in", then the corresponding motto for the left-wing monsters is "no one can get out": dependence on a bloated institution which no one can change, but which, we are told, exists for our "good". Instead of being killed by a gun-wielding psychopath, the left-wing kills us by slowly asphyxiating us under a warm, soft pillow, all with a smile gleaming with positive intentions, and the reassurance that this is for the greater good. In either case however, coercion is the name of the game, and conscious freedom—the ability for conscious qualities to express themselves freely, not for the self to do as it wants and dominate others—and real change, are left out of the equation.
1 I use 'schizoid' in a non-medical and non-official manner, firstly because I do not trust the psych industry, and secondly because no one needs credentials or authorities to talk about aspects of personal experience that we can have all access to.
2 The 4Fs are the familiar Fight or Flight responses, with the addition of Fawn, trying to befriend the threat, a very common strategy in social environments, and then Freeze, numb yourself so that you feel less pain, or in the case of animals, pass out so that the predator drops their guard, which could give you a chance to run away.
3 For more on that, see the 3rd part of Darren Allen's series on Neospeak, which focuses on the image and how it has degraded speech, and our experience of Reality.
4 More information is given in the channel Myopia is Mental.
5 There was a "mental illness" in the past called 'drapetomania', based on the curious observation that African slaves wanted to flee from their captivity at all costs. Odd thing isn't it? The hypothesis was that slavery was such an improvement for Africans that they should actually be grateful for their newfound conditions. We love to read those stories about the past because it confirms to us the idea that the modern world is so much more enlightened and morally superior to anything that came before it, and yet there is no fundamental difference between the modern label of ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) for children and the label of 'drapetomania' for African slaves. In both cases, there is no concern whatsoever about the freedom of a large group of people, and they are told that they should be grateful for living in servitude, except that in the past, the master was a human slave owner, whereas nowadays the master is an abstract institution which can keep defering responsibility whenever any problem shows up. But it's the same dynamic of oppression and unwillingness to listen to the other.
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Clusterfuckcollapse Dissociation Embodiment Socialmedia
2026-07-01