If you’re feeling numb, you’re probably finding it hard to make meaning. It may emerge from ongoing suffering due to the cyclical nature of the mundane, or, at the other end, from experiencing too much change, which can feel like instability. When asked to do something that feels like effort or requires energy, it feels like a unsurmountable undertaking, and you may choose to withdraw. This post asks you to look at your numbness differently.

Your numbness is not a personal defect but a manufactured state. Politicians and billionaires want us to be in a state of despair because despair is profitable. A mind that is plundered of its awareness has no room left for resistance. The repetitive influx of bad news, the dehumanization of marginalized communities, the overwhelm of social media, and, most hauntingly, AI, diminish our minds’ capacity to think for ourselves. If you cannot feel your life, you cannot fight for it or live it. If you can’t think, then you can’t challenge or see how you’re being disenfranchised.

How do we dream of a better world if we’re numb? To dream requires friction that develops within us if we are in touch with our own desires and discontent.

Numbness in the lives of Black folks can feel historical. In Rock My Soul, bell hooks argues that Black people have historically masked feelings and lied as tools for survival (55). Expressing discontent, anger, or even rage was discouraged because of whites’ ongoing exploitation and retaliation.

This historical necessity to go numb for safety has created a vulnerability that modern systems now exploit. What was once a mask to provide safety and protection is now what politicians and algorithms want to monopolize for profit. Yes, numbness can afford us temporary relief from wounds and the daily precarity one may feel; in a sense, it serves as a survival mechanism. Yet being in a state of numbness impedes our ability to critically analyze and embrace complexity, which is a form of resistance.

This perspective helps us move away from seeing numbness as an individual failure; it reminds us that the problems of our world are the root of our suffering. Although Angela Davis is not an existentialist, she notes that in the process of negation or conflict against development, the authentic self is formed. We become who we are through negation—by refusing the ‘simplicity’ of numbness and instead choosing the conflict of being fully awake. Numbness reduces our expansive human essence to only what feels secure and simple. It is also what the system wants you to be: a simple, numb consumer, rather than a soul with rigorous sociopolitical consciousness.

My numbness exists in my subconscious. When I realize I lack empathy or patience, or when I don’t remember what I was doing or how I got somewhere, it lets me know that oppressive forces have occupied the intimate corners of myself, and it’s a call to action to remember that I am joyfully alive. Embodiment is aliveness. Critical awareness is aliveness. Feeling is aliveness.

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