When the World Becomes Too Large to Carry

Why post-apocalyptic stories can feel strangely restorative in an age of information overload

The Modern Attentional Burden

By contrast, contemporary media can present a person, before breakfast, with a war in Eastern Europe, famine in Africa, a theological controversy in Rome, a murder somewhere in America, an outrageous remark by a politician, a school-board dispute three states away, somebody's offensive social-media post, an impending technological catastrophe, and several predictions about what civilization will look like decades from now.

And each arrives with an implicit demand:

That is an extraordinary cognitive and emotional burden.

The Appeal of a Smaller World

There is something basically sound in the intuition that earlier generations often lived in a more comprehensible attentional world.

This does not mean pioneer life was happier or easier. It frequently was not. Disease, infant mortality, isolation, dangerous work, economic insecurity, and premature death were commonplace.

But there was a profound difference in information ecology.

A Minnesota farmer in the nineteenth century might know that something terrible was happening in Europe. He might read about national politics in a newspaper. But he was not carrying a device that interrupted him repeatedly throughout the day to tell him what thousands of strangers thought about it.

That distinction matters.

Awareness Is Not the Same as Responsibility

A person can be aware of a war thousands of miles away. But unless that person is directly involved as a diplomat, soldier, relief worker, policymaker, donor, citizen of one of the affected countries, or someone closely connected to those involved, the capacity to affect events is usually very limited.

The nervous system, however, does not always make that distinction.

A human being yelling angrily from a screen can produce a real emotional reaction even though that person is thousands of miles away and will never enter one's actual life.

Social Media Abolishes Distance Without Giving Us Agency

For most of human history, distance protected attention.

Something happening ten thousand miles away ordinarily could not demand very much of a person because it was difficult to learn about quickly and difficult to influence.

Modern communications eliminated the first limitation without eliminating the second.

Repeat that process dozens of times a day and the result can be helplessness, anger, and exhaustion.

When Other People's Opinions Become Events

Social media introduces another distortion: other people's opinions themselves become events.

A person one has never met says something foolish in California. Someone screenshots it. Someone in New York condemns it. Someone in Texas condemns the condemnation. Someone produces a video about the controversy. An algorithm decides the dispute is likely to produce engagement and delivers it to thousands of additional people.

Suddenly people are being asked to have an emotional response to:

Why Apocalypse Fiction Can Feel Restorative

There is an irony in the appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction.

Objectively, the fictional world may be horrifying. Society has collapsed. People are dead. Food is scarce. Institutions have failed.

Subjectively, however, the surviving characters' field of responsibility becomes remarkably comprehensible:

That can be psychologically attractive even though virtually no one would actually want the catastrophe itself.

The Real Fantasy May Be Something Else

Perhaps the fantasy is not:

I wish civilization would collapse.

Perhaps it is:

That desire does not require an apocalypse.

A Christian Word for a Limited Sphere of Responsibility

Christianity has an old concept that fits this problem remarkably well: vocation.

Vocation reminds us that we do not have to carry responsibility for everything we can see.

Our obligations arise especially from the people, places, relationships, and responsibilities actually entrusted to us.

A person can pray for suffering halfway around the world. A person may sometimes contribute financially or practically to relieving it. But that does not mean every controversy on Earth has been assigned to that person.

It Is Permissible Not to Have an Opinion

One of the most liberating statements available in the information age may be:

There is an even stronger version:

That second statement may be especially important.

Modern technology makes it possible to investigate almost any controversy. That does not create an obligation to do so.

Attention Is a Limited Resource

Every controversy allowed into the mind occupies some portion of a finite attentional capacity.

Attention spent on a dispute among strangers cannot simultaneously be spent on a spouse, child, neighbor, friend, garden, church community, local problem, creative work, prayer, or rest.

Which matters deserve not merely my awareness, but my actual attention?

That may be a more useful question than asking whether a subject is important in the abstract.

Many things are important. Only a small number are actually ours to carry.

Contracting the World Without Escaping It

It may therefore be healthy to deliberately reduce one's attentional world.

This does not require becoming ignorant or indifferent. It means distinguishing between:

• what is happening,
• what is interesting,
• what is important,
• and what is actually mine to respond to.

Those categories are not identical.

Why Small-Community Stories May Help

This may also explain the appeal of stories centered on villages, homesteads, farms, small towns, and tightly connected communities.

Such stories reduce the narrative world to a comprehensible group of people who actually know one another.

In that sense, novels centered on small communities can function almost as the inverse of post-apocalyptic fiction.

Civilization has not ended. The world has simply been narrowed to a human scale.

Writers such as Wendell Berry, especially in his Port William stories and novels, often inhabit this kind of world: a place where relationships, obligations, work, memory, land, and community matter more than the endless churn of distant controversy.

A Question Worth Carrying

What has genuinely been entrusted to me today?

That question may do more for sanity than trying to decide what to think about everything happening everywhere.