I was tired one night recently.
For me, the camel’s back moment came after reading an article about powering down before sleep. A seemingly smart article if you could cut through the technobabble jargon of today’s world. An article seemingly with the simultaneous goal of plugging and debunking as many gadgets of blue lights and special glasses as possible.
I suspect tiredness is a typical feeling for a lot of you. Tiredness seems to be one of the top emotions during the past year of our lives, along with anxiety, confusion, depression, hunger, anger, hanger, restless leg syndrome, and oh-my-god-are-people-actually-taking-horse-dewormer-because-of-something-they-read-on-some-internet-forum-ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Most often I am tired because I skip out on sleep, overcompensate with coffee the next day, struggle to sleep the next night, and then overcompensate with coffee again. I recently read about how caffeine prevents us from getting healthy sleep and it upset me that people are trying to end something that makes life worthwhile with the facts and science about how bad it is for me.
But this time I wasn’t tired because of a lack of sleep. Nor was this a case of gastronomical overindulgence, which is the number one cause of Americans saying “Oh, I gotta go lay down.”
This time my tiredness came about because of the scrolling and clicking and reading. The page-turning, newspaper-folding, magazine-creasing. Again and again, day after day. The desire to stay up to speed on all the things happening in the world had once again left me exhausted.
I am running out of sync with my natural rhythms. I am all out of whack because I am too in the loop. Somewhere along the line I got stuck constantly trying to stay informed. And, of course, in the 24-hour news cycle, staying informed means being informed the minute news happens. Can’t be beaten to anything least one of my friends breaks the news to me and I am five minutes dumber than they are for the rest of the day. Can't miss the chance to get my take out there before somebody beats me to the punch with a similar but slightly more clever take on this hour’s top story.
I will find myself in a groove in my reading or writing or binge-watching only to be interrupted by the vibration of my phone with some BREAKING NEWS alert about the latest crisis that will fill me with dread and I must jump to it.
Or it will be the ding of an incoming message demanding my full undivided attention forcing me to pause whatever I am doing and quickly dash off some reply so I can remain alert and attentive to the other person in a conversation I did not know I was having at the moment. Personal life news is news too nowadays.
I have become so addicted to the interruption my mind will invent a vibrating feeling. They call this phantom vibration syndrome or ringxiety, which sounds like a bad sports debate show about arguing over who needs to win a championship more.
I will feel struck by an intuitive feeling that important news has just broken and hurriedly open another tab or check Twitter to see if something has just changed the status of the world. A form of channel surfing on the information superhighway. Some kind of quest to see if there might be something better on a different part of the web. Is this conversation, this thread, this podcast going to give me my next great idea?
All of this is draining. A second job on top of my day job, my regular life, my side-hustle, and the time I set aside each day to map out my goals to help achieve a better future. (That last part is a lie, I don’t do that, nobody should do that.)
I tried to remember when I first started living like this. The advent of smartphones with push notifications and social media rewarding breaking news coverage with traffic surely spurred this. Shortened my attention span and gave me a dopamine fix when I learned something new. So I have been living like this for most of my young adult life.
But why is it making me tired now? Am I spending even more of my waking hours tracking the events of the globe that it is extinguishing so much of my mental energy causing pre-mature fatigue? Or is this just a sign of me getting older? I am aging into my middle-aged looks and matching them with middle-aged problems. (Oh, I gotta go lay down.)
Like so many of the issues of modern life, I haven’t figured my way out of this just yet. Perhaps somebody will write an article about it. Perhaps that person will be me. So, please, remember to subscribe so you don’t miss the latest post.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives in New York.
This is the third piece in the ‘Three minutes or so’ series. (Which is, of course, an homage.)