You are awash in superstimuli.

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I’ve written other essays about the impact of this fact (that you are awash in superstimuli). But people might disagree with me about whether it’s good or bad, and what to do about it, so I wanted to make a standalone piece that just points at the fact.

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There are memes about, like. “A single Dorito has more extreme nacho flavor than a peasant would get in his whole lifetime,” and it’s true. Wars were fought over spices that pale in comparison to what is readily available to most of us at virtually all times. We regularly eat, offhandedly and without even paying attention, food more loudly and vividly delicious than monarchs, in ages past.

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Imagine being in a Dunbar-number tribe, or a pre-industrial city. You might encounter a few thousand people in your entire life. Imagine the most beautiful person you would ever meet—the 99.95th percentile of beauty.

In movies and advertisements and social media, you are regularly exposed to people who are not just the most beautiful out of a few thousand, but the most beautiful out of millions—and your exposure to them is enhanced by makeup and Photoshop and TikTok filters. Every single day, you encounter multiple people more beautiful than Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships.

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The device you are looking at right now is a light, and it’s shining directly into your eyes. It’s brighter than any candle, brighter than most flames.

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You are surrounded by color. Insanely varied, insanely intense. Color brighter and more vivid than all but the brightest fruits and bird plumage. Your eyes are flooded with color, all the time.

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The softest fabrics. The most pleasing textures. The smoothest, loveliest soap.

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You regularly move faster than the fastest horse, faster than all but the fastest birds. The world shifts around you with dizzying speed.

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Speaking of which: the swath of territory that is relevant to you is far vaster and more complex than it ever would have been, in the ancestral environment. You routinely make plans that involve going miles and miles away from your home. You routinely communicate with people all over the country—possibly all over the globe. You hear news from everywhere. You consume products from everywhere. Everywhere impinges upon you. The bubble of your locality is popped, shattered, gone.

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The music you hear—the movies and shows you watch—the emotional richness of the media you consume—at the push of a button, you can embed yourself in sounds more beautiful than anything in history, stories more moving and epic than anything the past had to offer. Your ancestors had Gilgamesh, and flutes played ‘round the fire; you have Spotify and the fruits of the entire Hollywood industry.

(You can also, with just a couple of clicks, expose yourself to realistic—and sometimes real—depictions of the very worst emotional or physical pain that can befall a human being.)

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A child pokes at an iPad. The iPad is different from the wooden toy horse.

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World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

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Chainsaws. Jackhammers. A/C compressors. The constant buzz of electricity. Roosters have a reputation for being loud, but a rooster crowing at your feet is quieter than a truck idling half a block away.

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In almost every possible way, your experience is more than it would have been, a thousand years ago. Louder, brighter, stronger, denser. More intense, more immediate, more varied.

This is not entirely good, and it’s not entirely bad. But it’s important to notice.

We are pushing the bounds of what we were built to handle. In many places, we’ve already broken through.

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