The Numbness Economy

She keeps The Great British Baking Show on in the background. Always.

She keeps The Great British Baking Show on in the background.

Always.

Not because she’s watching it. She’s folded laundry through the same episode four times. She can’t tell you who got eliminated. She just knows that without it, without the cheerful British voices, the oven timers, the gentle Paul Hollywood commentary, the silence in her apartment feels wrong. Crushing. Unbearable.

So it stays on. While she works. While she scrolls her phone. While she moves through the apartment doing chores she won’t remember. The TV talks to her so she doesn’t have to sit alone with her thoughts.

Her partner checks his phone 291 times a day. She’s watched him do it. Average screen time: 5 hours, 16 minutes. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for anymore. He just checks. While he cooks dinner. While they eat. While they’re in bed. The glow on his face like a nightlight.

She used to read, actual books, cover to cover. Can’t get through a single page now without picking up her phone. It’s been two years since she finished anything.

Then there’s the feeling underneath all of it: I can’t be alone with my thoughts anymore. When the TV is off and the phone dies, panic sets in. The silence isn’t peaceful. It’s suffocating.

Something has changed in the architecture of attention itself.

You used to be able to sit still. You used to be able to wait in line without pulling out your phone. You used to be able to eat a meal in silence. You used to be able to be bored.

Now boredom feels like drowning.

In 1985, media theorist Neil Postman warned that television wasn’t making us stupid. It was making seriousness itself impossible to sustain. The problem wasn’t that television presented entertaining subject matter, he wrote, but that all subject matter was presented as entertaining. A medium that makes you feel good while destroying your capacity to think hard.

He was describing television. But he was predicting the woman who can’t fold laundry without The Great British Baking Show. The man checking his phone 291 times a day. You, right now, mid-sentence, phone within reach.

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Autoplay and Scroll

The phone has a language of its own. Autoplay counts down. Three seconds. Two. One. ‘Up next.’ As if the next thing were already yours. As if you had asked.

The scroll doesn’t feel like a decision because it isn’t shaped like one. There’s no ending. No last page. No credits. No moment that asks, are you done? The feed removes the stopping point.

Even the refresh is a ritual. Pull down. Release. The little wheel spins like a blessing. The motion is soft. The reward is random. Sometimes there’s something new. Sometimes there isn’t. You do it again anyway. That’s the trick: make the behavior feel harmless and the outcome feel uncertain. A slot machine you can hold in one hand.

The algorithm learns what held you last time. Not what you consciously wanted, but what you couldn’t look away from. Outrage holds longer than joy. Anxiety holds longer than calm. Confusion holds longer than clarity. So that’s what it serves.

They call it “engagement,” the same way you call a hand around your throat an embrace. Not content. Conditioning.

The mechanics are converging. Recently, Instagram launched on TV, bringing vertical Reels to your living room screen. Not long after, Netflix added a TikTok-style scroll to its mobile app. The boundaries are dissolving. Soon there won’t be TV and phone. Just the feed, on every screen. The scroll is eating everything.

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Available Brain Time

In 2004, Patrick Le Lay, CEO of France’s largest private television network, explained his business model to journalists.

He said: “What we sell to Coca-Cola is available human brain time.”

Not shows. Not entertainment. Not content. Your brain. Available. Sold by the minute.

He kept going: “Nothing is more difficult than obtaining this availability… Our programs have the vocation of making the brain available: that is to say, to entertain it, to relax it, to prepare it between two messages.”

Read that again.

“To prepare it between two messages.”

Le Lay said the quiet part out loud.

Television sold minutes. The phone sells moments.

Television had to wait for you to sit down. Your phone goes with you everywhere. Television had commercial breaks. Your phone has ads woven into the content so seamlessly you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

The 291 checks leave a trail. What you paused on. What made you scroll back. How long before you picked the phone up again. Each pause becomes a data point. Each scroll becomes a score. Data brokers buy it, then sell it to anyone willing to pay. Corporations use it to target ads. Employers use it in hiring decisions. Insurance companies use it to adjust premiums. The same data streams that know when you pause on a video also feed systems that sort people into categories: risky, compliant, flagged for review. The drift becomes a file, traded in markets designed to be invisible. That file becomes a decision about your life made by someone you’ll never meet.

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Radio Figured It Out First

In 1922, the Queensboro Corporation paid fifty dollars for ten minutes on New York’s WEAF station. The first paid radio advertisement. At the time, radio stations existed to sell radios. Build a station, broadcast programs, get people to buy receivers. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover warned in 1924 that advertising would kill the medium: “I believe the quickest way to kill broadcasting would be to use it for direct advertising.”

He was wrong about what would die.

By 1930, ninety percent of American radio stations were broadcasting commercials. The business model had flipped entirely: stations were no longer selling radios to listeners but selling listeners to advertisers, bundling human attention into a commodity that could be priced, purchased, deployed.

Picture yourself then. You’ve saved for months to buy a radio, and finally, after dinner, the family gathers around it. The Maxwell House Show Boat comes on. You don’t know that Maxwell House owns that hour. You don’t know your attention, sitting there in your living room with your children, is being bundled and sold to a coffee company. You just know the music is beautiful and the house feels less lonely.

You thought you were listening to entertainment. You were the product. Your attention, your children’s attention, your Monday night after dinner, sold to the largest coffee and cigarette corporations in America.

Radio industrialized something that had always been true: if you can hold someone’s attention long enough, you can sell them. But radio made it scalable. Made it invisible. You thought you were being entertained. You were being prepared.

Prepared for what?

In 1984, Reagan’s campaign aired “Morning in America”: soft-focus images of weddings, flags, and work, scored like a lullaby. No argument. No policy. No promise that could be tested or measured. Just mood, just feeling, emotion severed from evidence and attached to a face. The available brain does not argue back. It receives the feeling, accepts the substitution, moves on.

The content never mattered. The feeling did. And the feeling only works if you are too relaxed, too comfortable, too entertained to notice the substitution happening.

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The Shift Bell

The LED TV in the background, the one murmuring The Great British Baking Show so the silence doesn’t crush you, was assembled in northern Vietnam. Bac Ninh province. Samsung’s electronics complex where women stand on assembly lines for eight to twelve hours building the screens that keep you company.

In March 2023, a 42-year-old woman died from methanol poisoning at a Samsung supplier. Two teenagers ended up in critical condition with severe eye and brain damage. Methanol, restricted inside Samsung’s own plants, yet still appearing in the supplier chain. Miscarriages so common they were “expected.”

The screen that soothes your panic about silence was built by hands that couldn’t rest. You use the TV to escape being alone with your thoughts. Someone in Bac Ninh made that TV in conditions where escape wasn’t possible. Where a shift bell, not boredom, controlled when attention could rest.

The TV doesn’t just deliver your drift. It was forged inside someone else’s. Availability has a cost. Someone else pays it.

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The Dependency

Attention was once something you could give. Now it’s something being taken, continuously, invisibly, and sold back to you as entertainment, as distraction, as relief from the silence the system itself made unbearable.

The woman can’t turn off The Great British Baking Show because silence has become an emergency. Her hand reaches for the remote, hovers, falls back. Not because she’s weak. Because the conditioning worked. So gradually, so gently, so entertainingly, that it feels like choice.

Her partner checks his phone 291 times a day because stillness has become a crisis. The phone on the nightstand, charging cable stretched across the bed like an IV line. The glow never really goes out.

You reach for your phone mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-meal. Not because you’re distracted. Because boredom, the condition that used to force you to think, to create, to connect, has been reframed as a problem that needs immediate solving.

This is what the exhaustion is. Not from working too hard. From working on yourself constantly. The woman lies in bed scrolling productivity tips about how to stop scrolling. Her partner reads articles about focus while checking his phone every ninety seconds. Optimizing, improving, producing, performing. The phone isn’t rest. It’s the shift bell that never stops ringing. Every scroll is labor. Every notification is a quota. You’re not relaxing. You’re being worked.

No one forces us to check. No one makes us scroll. The coercion has been internalized so completely that it feels like freedom. Like choice. We reach for the phone because we want to, and we want to because we’ve been trained to want to.

The panic when the phone dies isn’t irrational. It’s structural. We’ve been conditioned to outsource our interior lives to external stimulation, and when the stimulation stops, there’s nothing left inside to meet us. Just silence. Just ourselves. And that’s become unbearable.

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What Dies

There’s a part of us that knows what we’re becoming. We feel it when the phone dies and panic sets in. The throat tightens. The silence becomes unbearable. When we realize we haven’t finished a thought in weeks because the scroll interrupted it. That part, the one that watches us reach for distraction, that notices the substitution happening, is what’s dying.

Someone once said that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. But examination requires the ability to sit still long enough to see yourself clearly. To ask hard questions. To tolerate the discomfort of what you might find.

It’s been trained for something else entirely: to receive, to drift, to stay comfortable. The moment something demands effort, the thumb moves. The feed refreshes. The discomfort dissolves into the next thing.

Here’s what dies in that exchange.

Boredom. The condition that used to force you to pick up a book, call a friend, make something. Now it’s an error state. A problem to fix. Scroll until it stops.

Sustained attention. You can’t hold an argument long enough to follow it through. Can’t read past the headline without your hand moving toward the phone. The thread of thought breaks, and you don’t notice anymore because breaking has become normal.

The ability to be alone. Not lonely. Alone. Being alone is where you meet yourself. The woman reaching for the remote, hand stopping halfway, hovering, falling back. She’s not afraid of being lonely. She’s afraid of being alone. Afraid of what she’ll find in the silence. Or worse: afraid there’s nothing left to find.

You didn’t choose to lose these. They were rented out from under you.

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Still Running

The TV is still on in the background.

The Great British Baking Show, still murmuring. She reaches for the remote but her hand stops halfway. Hovers. Falls back to her lap. Her partner’s phone glows on the nightstand, charging. The cable stretched across the bed like an IV line. The feed still refreshing. Somewhere, the metric updates: time on page, engagement, conversion. Her brain, rented by the minute, delivered to the bidder who paid most.

The thing that used to hold her attention longer than six seconds is gone. The part that could sit with discomfort without reaching for a phone. The part that got bored and did something about it instead of turning on the TV for company.

It’s not coming back on its own.

In 1670, Blaise Pascal wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

He didn’t know about autoplay. He didn’t know about the scroll. He didn’t know about algorithms trained to exploit anxiety, about ads woven into content, about 291 daily checks, about available brain time sold by the minute.

But he knew this: the inability to be alone with yourself wasn’t natural. It was learned. And what’s learned can be unlearned.

Silence used to be bearable. Boredom was the condition that made everything else possible. Thinking. Making. Choosing.

Her partner reaches for his phone. The screen lights his face. 292.

In a factory in Bac Ninh, the shift bell rings. Another twelve hours. The cheerful voices keep talking. The oven timer still beeps. Nobody’s listening anymore.

Who’s renting you now?

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NOTES & SOURCES

NEIL POSTMAN (1985)

• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin Books, 1985): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297276/amusing-ourselves-to-death-by-neil-postman/

• Book summary & analysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

PATRICK LE LAY (2004)

• Variety report on Le Lay quote: https://variety.com/2004/tv/news/inside-move-tf1-selling-brains-to-sponsors-1117907882/

• Quote from Les Dirigeants face au changement (2004): “Ce que nous vendons à Coca-Cola, c’est du temps de cerveau humain disponible”

RADIO ADVERTISING HISTORY

• First paid radio advertisement (Queensboro Corporation, August 28, 1922, WEAF, $50 for 10 minutes): https://www.npr.org/2012/08/29/160265990/first-radio-commercial-hit-airwaves-90-years-ago

• Saturday Evening Post history: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2024/08/making-radio-pay-toll-broadcasting-and-the-first-ad-on-the-airwaves/

HERBERT HOOVER QUOTE (1924)

• Commerce Secretary quote on advertising killing broadcasting: Documented in broadcast history archives

• Referenced in: https://www.oldradio.com/current/bc_spots.htm

REAGAN “MORNING IN AMERICA” (1984)

• Original campaign ad archive: https://www.aaaa.org/blog/timeline-event/morning-america-dawn-first-political-ads/

• Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/ronald-reagan-morning-in-america-campaign-1984/2018/09/10/e42baddc-b525-11e8-ae4f-2c1439c96d79_video.html

INSTAGRAM ON TV / NETFLIX SCROLL

• Instagram Reels on TV (2024): https://www.theverge.com/news/845124/instagram-reels-tv-app

• Netflix TikTok-style scroll feature: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2025/05/07/netflixs-big-interface-revamp-gives-more-info-better-search-a-dash-of-tiktok/

BAC NINH SAMSUNG FACTORY

• March 2023 methanol poisoning deaths: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/vietnam-report-alleges-methanol-poisoning-death-and-injuries-a-result-of-chronic-mismanagement-of-toxic-chemicals-in-samsung-supply-chain/

• Working conditions investigation: https://ipen.org/news/samsung-whistleblower-reveals-toxic-chemical-use-and-violations-samsung-vietnam

AVERAGE PHONE USAGE / SCREEN TIME

• 291 checks per day statistic: https://www.reviews.org/mobile/cell-phone-addiction/

• 5+ hours daily average: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats

DATA BROKERS & SURVEILLANCE

• Data broker industry overview: https://epic.org/issues/consumer-privacy/data-brokers/

• FTC report on data brokers: https://www.ftc.gov/reports/data-brokers-call-transparency-accountability-report-federal-trade-commission-may-2014

BLAISE PASCAL QUOTE (1670)

• Pensées (Pensée 139): “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”

• Modern translation available in: Penguin Classics edition, translated by A.J. Krailsheimer

BOOKS REFERENCED

Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin, 1985)

Simone Weil - Gravity and Grace (University of Nebraska Press, 1952) - on attention as rarest form of generosity

Byung-Chul Han - The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2015) - on self-optimization and exhaustion

Blaise Pascal - Pensées (1670, various translations)