Beware the Anesthetized Life

It’s common to assume the big problem driving political and cultural polarization is that we feel too deeply—our passions run too hot, and we’ve become too intense about too many things. What we need is to lower the temperature and learn to chill out, to simmer down the passionate feelings that lead to so much unrest.

I wonder, though, if the deeper problem for many in our society is the reverse. We don’t feel enough. Our emotions are shallow and superficial, our mouth stifling a permanent yawn. Our outlook is shaded by cynicism, the apathy of memes, the replacement of substance with vibes.

Is it possible that in all our therapeutic attempts to anesthetize ourselves from feeling pain, we’ve also numbed ourselves to the experience of joy? Maybe we’re so distracted by entertainment and driven by our devices that polarization becomes attractive and anger enjoyable because at least then we feel something. Resentment, contempt, disdain, and rage may be negative emotions, but at least they make you feel alive again.

If I’m right, the Christian call to peacemaking in this cultural moment will not be accomplished by wagging the finger at those passionate about a cause or angered by injustice, just telling them to “temper down.” Spreading shalom won’t happen by prescribing more sedatives. Especially if, when we try to lower the temperature or tame the passions, a younger generation imagines we’re telling them to go back to a way of life they’re longing to escape: the lonely, isolated world of screens, text threads, and online forums, drugged by endless scrolling and swiping, with the phone as a pacifier.

Life Without Resistance

One of the most important books this year, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation , shows the lengths to which parents and teachers go to shelter and coddle kids and students from the unavoidable pains and sufferings in this life. We think happiness will be achieved not by building resilience through overcoming resistance but by not feeling resistance at all.

All these plans backfire, of course, because the good life is an adventure. Love is risky. Love opens your heart to hurt, deep hurt. Close relationships always come with challenges. Stepping up in leadership requires us to overcome the fear of failure or to develop thick skin whenever we’re criticized. Some ambitions do get crushed. Sometimes the righteous cause fails.

Ronald Dworkin warns about the new promises of “a de-problematized existence.” It’s the idea that discomfort, resistance, and challenge are indications of failure, something to be resolved through technology rather than endured and overcome through religious faith and persistence. If I encounter friction or pushback, something must have gone wrong! In the past, he writes, “people had to resist overbearing families, overbearing neighbors, and overbearing communities in order to preserve their individuality. Today, many Americans are so alone that they have no one who needs to be resisted.”

Life of the Dropout

It’s never been easier to orient your life around avoiding risks and preserving a semblance of inner peace. Retreat into yourself and voila!—you don’t have to deal with pesky people. Burrow into your cave of video games, the magic mirror of social media scrolling , the next recommendation on Netflix, or (in more extreme cases) a reliance on prescription drugs or weed or alcohol or the choice of porn over real-life relationships, and you won’t feel as much pain or suffering.

The problem is, this way of life keeps you from feeling much of anything. These are anesthetics, designed to keep us pacified. They isolate us from others. They numb us to real human connection.

It’s been two decades since Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone warned about this trajectory. Ryan Burge now surveys “the dropouts” —those who look at all the institutions that once consumed a huge part of American social life and conclude, “I don’t need any of this.” We’ve not arrived at the extremes we see in other countries (the severely reclusive hikikomori in Japan, for example) but what might slow or stop this trend?

Local associations and council meetings are increasingly overshadowed by national politics we observe on TV. In-person interactions at church are less common when people choose instead to just tune in online. Educational opportunities seek to eliminate all resistance and challenge, to simplify and make the process as easy as possible. To what end? So we have more time to hole up in our rooms like ghosts, waiting for whatever the algorithm serves up next?

Why the Dropout Phenomenon Matters

The scariest part of the anesthetized life is its self-perpetuating tendency. Dworkin writes ,

The more people retreat into the numbness of this life, the fewer people there are to push for and promote other things. The fewer people who pursue real human connection, the fewer people in the next generation who even know what that kind of life looks like. The more people retreat from the intimidating and discouraging aspects of building and sustaining friendships, the fewer people there are who know how to make friends and keep them.

The idea that a painless, frictionless, resistance-less life is what will make us happy is wrong. The best things in life require time and effort. The most rewarding relationships are forged through seasons of suffering and challenge. The best conversations are often full of disagreement and debate—tensions and passions that must be tamped down for the friendship to endure. There’s no such thing as a happy life of love that doesn’t impinge on our personal freedom.

But, some will say, is this not just setting ourselves up for sadness, for betrayal, for additional hurt? Yes, of course! That vulnerability is a vital part of what makes relationships work. We cannot experience rich relationships without some level of risk.

Necessity of Resistance

Here’s where the church must propose a counterintuitive though desperately needed alternative. Performative polarization as a solution to the anesthetized life will never satisfy. Neither will the avoidance of all discomfort and pain in relationships. Resistance is good. And necessary. There’s no such thing as limitless freedom, happiness without boundaries, or the good life without friction and pushback.

“We are afflicted in every way but not crushed,” writes the apostle Paul. “We are perplexed but not in despair; we are persecuted but not abandoned; we are struck down but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:8–9 ). And all his apostolic exertion is for the benefit of God’s people, so that thanksgiving increases to the glory of God (v. 15). There’s no “weight of glory” without “momentary light affliction” (v. 17).

The gospel may sometimes feel like a splash of cold water on the face, but that’s part of its purpose: to awaken us to greater glories and to give meaning and purpose to our struggle—the promise of joy in the resistance we encounter as we press on toward the prize. Don’t settle for the anesthetized life, brothers and sisters. Don’t settle.