In 1953 letter to Lionel Trilling, in the throes of Augie March, Saul Bellow diagnoses the problem with social media:

“When the daily life of a people is full of astonishments, miracles and wonders, the lives of individuals are duller (a natural reaction to the disorganizing hyperaesthesia resulting from overstimulation) and the greater the disorder and lack of agreement the larger the number of spokesmen for ‘normalcy.’”

Gonna rename my Substack “Disorganizing Hyperaesthesia.”