In this month's Harper's, Thomas de Zengotita presents an intriguing essay: "The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as Anesthetic". He argues that information overload has made it impossible for us to tell reality from fiction. As an example, he comments on our response to the September 11 attacks: "You are so used to being moved by footage, by stories, by representations of all kinds...It's not your fault that you are so used to being moved, you just are...So it's not surprising that you have learned to move on so readily to the next, sometimes moving, moment. It's sink or surf. Spiritual numbness guarantees that your relations with the moving will pass. And the stuffed screen accommodates you with moving surfaces that assume you are numb enough to accommodate them."

According to de Zengotita, depth in life is what will save us from this numbness. But instead of depth, we turn to our neurotic pursuit of high-stress "busyness", thinking it will re-energise us and neutralise the numbness. "We will so conduct ourselves that everything becomes an emergency...Stress is how reality feels. People addicted to busyness, people who don't just use their cell phones in public but display in every nuance of cell-phone deportment their sense of throbbing connectedness to Something Important—these people would suffocate like fish on a dock if they were cut off from the Flow of Events they have conspired with their fellows to create. To these plugged-in players, the rest of us look like zombies, coasting on fumes. For them, the feeling of being busy is the feeling of being alive." Unfortunately, we don't realise that, in the end, this pursuit of busyness creates more of the cultural and information overload that made us numb in the first place! It is akin to throwing good money after bad.

I can take de Zengotita's ideas and apply them to modern academia. Take the up-and-coming careerist academic who finds herself so numbed by the plethora of information and theories in her field that she tries to break out of it by creating what she thinks is the biggest "breakthrough" theory ever—the theory that will end all theories. But her final theory adds only to the mind-numbing pile of theories that drove her mad in the first place—not only because it increases the number of available theories, but also because it is probably a mediocre one to begin with. Much of what we call "new" and "groundbreaking" has no real value or substance because it wasn't created for its own sake; it was created in order to numb feelings of numbness. The cycle is self-perpetuating.