Modern life constantly pressures you into low-grade sedation because a person who feels nothing doesn’t interfere with anything. In practice, this means that every time you feel overwhelmed, lonely, angry, or uncertain, the easiest available escape — your phone, food, porn, alcohol, work, television, online noise — is right there waiting to catch you before you do something disruptive, creative, or self-respecting.

The more often you choose sedation, the less capacity you have to imagine alternatives to your life, so over time you stop fighting, stop dreaming, stop initiating, and start floating through existence in a half-alive state. Sedation becomes the “acceptable” way to cope because everything in the system — from corporate incentives to tech algorithms to social norms — aligns around keeping you calm enough to function but too dulled to rebel. The blade cuts deepest when you realize that sedation feels like relief in the moment but slowly destroys the part of you that could have built something real.