It's time that I look seriously into the fact that I am sensitive and how I can better handle that part of my life properly. The creative aspect of my life has been slowly falling on the wayside over the past 4 or 5 years, not because I haven't "tried enough", although I can always work on my focus which is far from exemplary, but because firstly, I tend to feel a significant amount of tension while I am drawing, and secondly, I find that my mind tends to look for a lot of distraction as a result of not feeling at ease in my body, because I carry a lot of low-grade anxiety. This is about relaxation and undoing patterns of anxiety, not about willpower or looking for a clever system of productivity.
To be sensitive simply means to be more affected by the world around you, to take it in more easily. Infants for instance are incredibly sensitive, because they are unable to defend or provide for themselves in any capacity. They are utterly reliant on their parents, most notably their mother, for their food and protection, which is why they will cry if they feel like their needs aren't met, or if they feel danger from their environment. As a result, they do not have a real sense of self yet because whatever bad mood is in their surroundings directly affects them, such that in a sense they "are" the room. If their mother is distressed, they will also be distressed, if there is an argument between the parents they will feel it, even if they cannot understand what is being said, and if there is a pleasant sense of joy and playfulness, they will feel that too and naturally smile.
On the other hand, insensitive people are utterly clueless about their surroundings. They will talk on and on about themselves in a conversation even if the other side isn't interested at all, because they do not feel, or rather they do not even care about what the other is feeling. Or they only see other people in the way that they can be useful to them, like a boss delegating their work to their employee, no matter how the latter feels about it. Or they will not see the way that another person is trying to join the conversation, or shows interest in them, and so on.
As a result, nothing strikes insensitive people as particularly beautiful, intriguing, or even just weird, they have this general sense of apathy about them, which is why they tend to seek crude forms of stimulation: violent movies and video games, horror, loud noises, and of course pornography.
In contrast, sensitive people are easily touched by beauty, because in general they pay attention to what's around them. Not in a narrow way, the way in which we tunnel vision onto things when we are engaged in the watch-watch-watch mode of perception, but rather in a broad, panoramic way, the kind that allows us to feel touched by the wideness of the sky around us, or to see beauty in anything really. It is impossible to feel the soft and mysterious beauty of Reality when you are stuck in a narrow mode of perception, because it channels all of your attention towards your self: what could threaten me? what could be useful for me? what do I like and not like? This is why the porn stare that results from long hours of looking fixedly at a screen leads to apathy, boredom, and disconnect from others, because it converts the whole of Reality into bits and pieces which you can like or not, thereby destroying mystery and beauty.
This is why insensitive people are utterly indifferent to aesthetics, or art in general. Not because they merely have different preferences, but because their perception itself is different, it is more hard and more self-centered. They might enjoy a delicious meal, because food provides relief to the body, and likewise they might respect professions that lean more towards craft rather than pure artistry, the ones that have more practical aspects to them, 1 but overall they do not care about art, because art deals firstly with what is beyond the self, and secondly with the inherent qualities of what it describes, the thing-in-itself. Insensitive people couldn't care less about those two things. They are entirely bound by their self, such that they do not have access to the thing-in-itself, only what their self thinks of it (likes and dislikes), or the idea of the thing in front of them, or the way it can be useful to them.
Perhaps you've noticed that the vast majority of people are incredibly insensitive? This is not a coincidence, the modern world tends to crush sensitivity out of people, and tends to reward insensitivity. Not in every situation, as some aspects of sensitivity can still be used by the machine-world, but by and large, the less sensitive (and conscious, the two go together) you are, the more worldly success you will have. It's much easier to get ahead of other people if you don't really think of them as people. It's much easier to live in our ugly, joyless world if you do not perceive beauty and do not feel much joy to begin with, thereby making you feel like everything is "fine". And it's much easier to live in our unconscious world, driven by habits and fears and reward mechanisms, if you yourself aren't very conscious, because then there is nothing in you that you need to betray in order to fit in.
Let's note here that the self is important to become a well-developed adult. Children aren't as sensitive as infants and this is because their sense of self is growing, which is of course vital to grow as a person. As they learn to walk they learn to navigate their environment, as they learn to talk they learn to express themselves, and slowly but surely they start to be involved in more and more complex situations. As such, they have an increased capacity to respond well to those situations because their self wields more power, which can lead to a struggle in the other direction when they start acting selfishly just to feel in control, as parents who know about the "terrible twos" can attest.
But still, young children, before they go to school, tend to be deeply curious about everything, and they still have a core of aliveness which compels them to play, explore and laugh a lot. 2 The problem is not the self, it is when the self overwhelms one's consciousness, which is what happens with people growing up in our world. Have you noticed how adults, in contrast to children, are basically dead inside? Even as young as their 20s, they are basically a shell of their former self when it comes to range and depth of expression.
A healthy self allows people to not be disoriented by the storm of their emotions, which is very important of course, but the rigid, mask-like self that most people have is not that, it is directly aimed at getting them to accept the utterly insane lifestyles of the modern world. The decline in sensitivity and aliveness that occurs with the start of schooling happens because all institutions need obedient workers to maintain them, people who are predictable, who will do their assigned tasks without protesting, and who are afraid of authorities. This is really what schooling is about: not about learning, which is secondary at best, but about fitting into the machine of the world.
People become insensitive after years of schooling because they learn that their natural joy and curiosity is not rewarded by our world. Worse, it is actively punished, as children are made docile so that they do not disrupt the tedious lessons given by the worn out teacher. They go from a mode of living centered around exploration, learning from one's environment directly through trial and error and through their senses, to one which is mediated and focused on coercion.
Instead of learning from their own experience, they learn from a textbook. Instead of having their natural initiative, they need to ask permission to a teacher. Instead of having their own strengths and weaknesses which they learn how to use best, they need to work through the same cookie-cutter curriculum at the same pace as everyone else. And instead of the joy of living, exploring, and connecting with others, they are forced down the path of trying to get "the right answer", the answer that the teacher expects of course, and on which they can get punished for if they do not get it right. 3
The absurdity and destructive nature of school doesn't shock most adults because they have become so insensitive that they can no longer relate with how they were as children. Just like how someone falling asleep doesn't notice it, because they lose the very same faculty that would allow them to be aware of whether they are awake or not, someone who becomes insensitive doesn't notice it, because to notice it would itself require sensitivity.
This is one explanation for the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect, that the level of discernment of your own abilities is itself limited by your discernment, such that those who know or feel very little think that the extend of their abilities delineate the horizons of mankind at large.
The insensitivity of our world goes much deeper than what happens in schools however, even if it is by far the most important example, because it creates the transition from the joyous children we know and love, to the apathetic, bored (and boring) and insensitive adults that make up most of the population.
Just take a look at the average office, and how utterly devoid of any beauty it is. Many offices do not look all that different from those empty white rooms used to torture people through stimulus deprivation. Here too the office is not supposed to be a place of delight, community and meaningful work, but rather one of habits and enforced boredom, which makes the meaningless tasks labeled as "work" as more interesting in comparison. There is nothing beautiful to look at in the office, because you are supposed to stare at your tiny rectangle-screen for hours upon ends, even if you are not particularly productive, because once again obedience is the most important virtue.
The same is true for hospitals and the dentist office, the latter being eerily similar to the inside of alien spaceships depicted in movies, in the scenes where the aliens probe and dissect human beings in a white room under fluorescent light. No wonder that children are so afraid of the dentist, especially because of the loud noises and general tension in the room, because the environment registers as deeply unfriendly and overwhelming to them.
Think back to the fact that humans evolved in woodlands and savannas, surrounded by plants, trees and natural lighting, and accompanied with an overall quietness, and now try to imagine dragging someone living there their entire life into a dentist office. This is essentially what we do to children, because our nervous system is still calibrated for the wild, no matter how much we try to domesticate the wildness out of people in the modern world.
And while I can't speak for what pregnant women experience in the hospital, one can only imagine how distressful it must be to be surrounded by people who do not really acknowledge your emotional state and the sheer physical pain of giving birth, because they are professionals who are there to do a job as quickly as possible, not there to attend to the unique needs of human beings.
In contrast, giving birth was of central importance in primal cultures, such that entire rituals were centered around how to best accompany a laboring woman. We might sneer at their superstitious tendencies nowadays, but one thing that so-called "primitive" cultures did a lot better than us is that they weren't in a rush for anything. They were not driven by profits, perpetual busy-ness and constrained by rigid schedules, which meant that they could allow the process of giving birth to take as long as the woman needed it to be. Their cultures were in sync with the sensitivity of its people, rather than the latter being crushed under an agenda of growth and vacuous economical figures.
This fundamental inversion is why so much of our world is wrong. The logic of the technological system dominates the lives of people, such that beauty, community and basically every human need is subsumed into a machine-world which can do one and only one thing: perpetuate its existence and expand its power, at all costs.
This is because the self, by itself, is essentially a machine, blind to anything outside of it, which compels it to rationally maintain itself. The self only perceives its cold representations of Reality, its ideas of what things are, or its likes and dislikes, or what can be useful to it, but it is utterly blind to the simple aspects of the thing-in-itself, which is why it is inherently insensitive.
A world built by insensitive selves is then, unsurprisingly, insensitive, but also brutally rational and efficient when it comes to getting what it needs. Insensitive people are not stupid in practice, but they are monstrously blind to fundamental aspects of reality. They tend to be very effective in their narrow range of discipline, which allows them to get ahead of other people, but when it comes to life itself, the ability to experience anything consciously, to love people dearly and be willing to live for them, and to feel the natural joy and curiosity which young children know so well, because they are it, there is basically nothing there, which is why as our world becomes more and more insensitive, it becomes both increasingly hollow, and also increasingly extravagant as a means to hide it.
This is why everything becomes a more extreme of itself: more violence, more noise, more speed, more horror, more addiction, more video games. The self, by itself, can only double down on itself, because it is unable to give up itself. Sacrifice itself for what? Nothing exists outside of my representations of Reality. If my self, i.e. my emotions, or mind, or will, cannot grasp something, then it doesn't exist.
Thus the self, by itself, will reject art, or beauty, or love, or God, or mystery, in favor of its own ideas, likes and dislikes, and it will never be able to understand what exactly is ailing it. Because every self which is disconnected from Reality experiences alienation, but because it is unable to look beyond, it then blames this or that thing that it can find outside of itself: politicians, businessmen, minorities, women, religion, younger people, older people, etc. There is always something to blame for the self, because it is fundamentally unable to assess itself accurately.
All of this to say that insensitivity in practice does not feel as such from the inside. Instead, it feels like a rational rejection of things you do not understand, a smug dismissal of vast segments of human experience, but all of this is a convenient cover for fear, the root of insensitivity. Confront an unconscious person with their inevitable death, and they'll be sure to change the subject, or attack you personally, or laugh about it so as to pretend they are above it, but it is obvious that they are terrified about their death, because they only live for their self, which is finite, mortal.
This is why an insensitive world is also utterly in denial of death, and tries to remove pain as much as possible, because those force the self to contend with a reality beyond itself. Pain does not care about your opinions, or credentials, or wealth, or status, or likes and dislikes, it just is. And likewise with death, which cuts through human bullshit far more effectively than any debate ever could. Those who love the most often have an intimate relationship with Death. Not necessarily because death itself is "good", but at the very least because it is a good teacher. It does not compromise on anything, it is not someone you can argue with and find clever counter-arguments to, it just is. And its lesson is simple but terrifying to the self: live Life fully, surrendered to something greater than your self, because the self that you cling to is mortal, but Life itself is not.
1 Carpentry has an aesthetic component, and no doubt that the greatest carpenters are artists in their own right, but you can make perfectly usable wooden furniture with just utilitarian goals in mind, which is why Ikea works and is widespread across the globe. Craft is about usability, whereas art is about pointing beyond the self, like how the greatest myths inspire us to live for something greater than us.
2 At least without the intervention of screens. I do not know what screens do to children but it cannot be good. I myself only started having a computer when I was 8 or 9 years old, so a few years after entering school.
3 In other words, in school you internalize a sense of "right" and "wrong" which are aligned with the insane demands of the technological system, not what is actually moral or true. If you go against the coercion of our world and instead trust your instincts, you are deemed as a "bad" person, whereas if you go along, no matter how insensitive and stupid you are, you are a "good" person.
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Sensitivity Narrowattention Art Children Dunningkruger Inversion Technosystem
2026-03-28