Supernormal Stimuli: How a Culture of Constant Stimulation Is Undermining Your Life

Why does modern life feel overwhelming even when nothing is “wrong”?

Why do so many people feel restless, dissatisfied, emotionally fragile, and disconnected from themselves, their relationships, and the life they thought they wanted?

In this episode of The Voyage Cast, Eddie begins a three-part series by exploring a powerful but rarely discussed force shaping modern emotional life: supernormal stimuli.

Supernormal stimuli are artificially intensified experiences—hyper-palatable food, social media, pornography, constant entertainment, endless notifications—that overwhelm the nervous system and retrain the brain to prefer intensity over depth, novelty over meaning, and escape over engagement.

Drawing from psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, this episode explains:

• Why our nervous systems feel overloaded and dysregulated
• How modern overstimulation disrupts the rhythms humans were created for
• Why boredom, patience, and emotional endurance are becoming rare
• How overstimulation quietly undermines marriage and long-term intimacy
• Why dissatisfaction has become the default emotional state
• What it means to reclaim a truly human pace of life

This is not an argument against pleasure, technology, or progress.

It is a warning about what happens when artificial intensity replaces the slow, formative experiences that create emotionally mature adults.

If you feel overstimulated, restless, or unsure why normal life feels harder than it should, this episode will give you language, clarity, and a path forward.

This is Part One of a three-part series.

Next: The Pseudo-Enlightenment — How Modern Culture Dismantled the Structures That Create Adults.

Transcript

The Voyage Cast (00:00.792)
how overstimulation reshapes the human psyche, restructures culture, and undermines our humanity. Hey, welcome back to the Voyagecast. I'm Eddie, as always, your host here to help you on your day to day, to help you beyond the office. And today we're going to begin a three-part series that I've been wanting to get into for some time now. And I believe it's essential for understanding what's really happening to us in this modern world that we live in.

So over the next few episodes, three total, we are going to explore why so many individuals feel overwhelmed, restless, dissatisfied, emotionally fragile, and probably increasingly disconnected from themselves and from others and the kind of life they thought they were supposed to have or want. Now this series is going to be about a number of different things. We're to go through kind of some different

Now this series is going to be about psychology, anthropology, philosophy, marriage, identity, and emotional adulthood. But today we're going to begin at the most basic level of the nervous system, attention, and desire. We're going to talk about overstimulation. Now the title of this episode, this part one, is the super normal trap. And my hope is that by the end of this episode, you will have language for something you've probably felt for a long time, but perhaps you've never fully understood.

what it was that you're feeling. Not because something is necessarily wrong with you. I mean, maybe, who knows, but because something has probably gone more wrong with the environment shaping modern human life or modern culture. So slow down, have a cup of coffee, enjoy your drive to work or whatever it is, and let's get into it.

All right. So part one of part one is the modern feeling we cannot quite explain. You see, most people carry today a persistent sense of restlessness that they struggle to really name. Life is full, yet they feel really empty. Life is busy, yet it feels unsatisfying. Life is loud, yet somehow it feels kind of undernourishing. In my counseling practice, people say things like, I don't know why I'm so irritable all the time.

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I feel bored even when I'm entertained. can't sit still without my phone. Why does everything feel like too much? Why does my marriage feel harder than it should? What's wrong with me? What's wrong with them? What's wrong with this world that we live in? And here's the first thing I want you to hear very clearly because we're not really going to be focusing on this because I'm not your therapist. You're not in my room and I don't know your story.

So we're going to start with the assumption that for the moment, nothing's really wrong with you. Psychologically, however, what we are seeing is not widespread personal failure, but maybe, maybe a widespread nervous system overload. You see anthropologically, people are living far outside the rhythms that shaped human life for thousands of years.

Philosophically, we've lost a shared framework for understanding what human life is actually for and how to do it. We're not really well, we are broken, but we're also really flooded. And that's the part I really want to focus on for this episode. And once we name that, the next question becomes pretty obvious. What are we flooded by? To answer that, we need language for the kind of stimulation shaping modern life.

And so that language is this. What is super normal stimuli? And I want to give you a bit of a definition just as part two of this episode.

All right, so part two, I think helps give us that definition and helps us shape our understanding. What is super normal stimuli? And we're going to give a bit of a psychological definition, okay? So super normal stimuli is an artificially intensified version of a natural cue that produces a stronger reaction in the brain than the real thing was ever intended to produce. So in simple terms,

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It takes something real and exaggerates it beyond the range of the typical human person or the typical experience we are created to handle. So more sweetness than any fruit, more sexual imagery than any real relationship, more novelty than any human mind can meaningfully integrate, more outrage, more fear and drama than a village scale human community would ever encounter.

Psychologically, this matters because the brain rewards our system. Psychologically, this matters because the brain's reward system is designed for proportionality. Reward is meant to correspond to effort, relationship, patience, and meaning. Supernormal stimuli breaks that relationship. They offer reward without effort, pleasure without patience, excitement without any depth.

connection without any real vulnerability of your heart to that person. Examples are everywhere. Hyperflavored food, pornography, social media, endless streaming content, video games, constant notification, fear-driven news. If you've been living under a rock, that's everywhere. Emotionally charged media constantly inundating us, right? These experiences are not neutral. They're almost recalibrated, maybe even deliberately.

These experiences are not neutral. They recalibrate the nervous system. But to really understand why this recalibration is so destabilizing, we have to kind of zoom out beyond the individual brain and look at the broader human context. This is why I don't want to look at us as individuals, partly because I don't know you if you're just listening. And if I do know you, then great, we'll talk about it later.

So, but to really understand why this recalibration is so destabilizing, we have to really zoom out beyond the individual brain and look at the broader human context. That means turning to something like anthropology. Anthropologically, we've lost a human rhythm, a natural way of being. And anthropology gives us crucial context here.

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Across every culture prior to the modern world, human life was shaped by a basic day-to-day human rhythm. The rhythm of daylight and darkness and seasons. The rhythm of shared meals, of work and rest. The rhythm of long conversations, of rituals and traditions like Christmas. We just celebrated Christmas. The rhythm of limited sensory input. Maybe something you haven't quite thought of yet. These rhythms

are not accidental. They actually regulate our emotional life. They shape our attention. They ground desire. They teach patience and endurance and meaning through repetition. Human beings were created for rhythm. Modern life has systematically dismantled that normal human rhythm. We now live in a world with no natural stopping points.

No silence unless we force it. No boredom unless we protect it. No limits on stimulation. No shared pacing of life. Anthropologically speaking, this is really unprecedented in human history. No society ever recorded has lived with constant sensory saturation. It just doesn't exist. When rhythm disappears, emotional regulation disappears with it.

People feel restless without knowing why, anxious without danger, tired without exertion, bored without stillness. This is not pathology. It's kind of a disorientation to a modern world that we were never really meant to live in, right? Now, we understand, now that we understand what's been kind of been lost externally, we can turn inward and look at what this does to us.

Because the loss of rhythm does not stay cultural. It becomes neurological. So let's look at how supernormal stimuli hijacks the brain. Okay, so when you encounter supernormal stimulus, your brain releases dopamine. This is like common, this is a common word these days in the modern culture, which is strange. Not the dopamine of deep satisfaction though, but the dopamine of craving, anticipation and intensity.

The Voyage Cast (09:22.732)
And this surge is far greater than what ordinary life produces. The brain always seeking balance adapts. It raises the baseline. says, well, I guess this supernormal thing is just normal now. And then something subtle but devastating happens. Real food starts to taste bland. Real conversations feel slow and boring. Real intimacy feels underwhelming.

And sometimes we'll even blame people for just not trying. Real marriage feels unexciting. Real quiet feels uncomfortable. Like we can't even tolerate silence. Maybe that's why you're listening to this podcast today, because you can't tolerate silence. I don't know. That's a weird kind of double bind. You see, the brain has not become broken necessarily. It has become accustomed to this super normal stimulus.

Supernormal stimuli, the brain has not become broken. It has become accustomed. Supernormal stimuli do not simply entertain us. They retrain our nervous system. They teach our system to prefer intensity over depth, novelty over meaning, escape over engagement. And once the nervous system has been retrained this way,

There is a pretty predictable emotional set of consequences. You see, satisfaction becomes harder and harder to access. How terribly depressing is that? Because dissatisfaction then becomes what? Our default. One of the most significant consequences of this overstimulation is chronic dissatisfaction. People might say,

Nothing really satisfies me anymore. get bored so fast. I always need something on. I feel restless even when things are good. If you have children, I am certain in this modern day and age, you've heard some of these kind of things. Anthropologically, makes a lot of sense, right? Traditional cultures found meaning in contributing, contribution in society, contributing to society, repetition, belonging, and shared struggle.

The Voyage Cast (11:43.18)
Psychologically, supernormal stimuli bypasses these pathways and condition people to chase stimulation instead of meaning. I keep hearing all these YouTube videos and these people putting out these videos all the time. I keep hearing all these YouTubers say things like, oh, this is so satisfying. Fill in whatever video and you're going to hear, oh, this is so satisfying, so satisfying. It's some kind of ASMR experience. And it's getting

annoying actually because I'm so sick and tired of hearing it. So on with what I was saying.

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Philosophically, this reduces life to pleasure rather than purpose. So dissatisfaction is not a character flaw. It's a predictable outcome now of living outside the environment we were created for truly. But dissatisfaction does not remain isolated. Over time, it begins to shape who we become emotionally, which brings us to the question of maturity and part six of this.

Emotional maturity and the capacity to tolerate discomfort. One of the clearest markers of emotional adulthood is the ability to tolerate discomfort.

The Voyage Cast (13:07.679)
You see, one of the clearest markers of emotional adulthood is the ability to tolerate discomfort. And in fairness, I've had a really hard time with this, but I've learned over the years because I've put what I practice or what I preach into practice. And it's the ability to stay present during boredom, to regulate emotional, your emotions during conflict, to endure seasons that are quiet and unexciting, to work through tension instead of escaping it.

Psychology calls this self-regulation, right? Pretty straightforward. Supernormal stimuli, however, weakens or can weaken self-regulation by training the nervous system to avoid discomfort at all cost. The result is a rise in, there's a bunch of stuff, irritability, impatience, low frustration tolerance, emotional reactivity, avoidance of conflict, difficult repairing, relationships, dependence on distraction.

This is not because people are weak. It's because they're overstimulated all the time. were not meant to be. Human beings were created with enormous capacity for endurance, but endurance only develops in an environment that includes limits, stillness, and manageable difficulties. It's a lot like working out. But modern life removes all three.

And when emotional maturity erodes, the first places we see the cost is in our most precious relationships like marriage.

Marriage is one of the most human paced relationships we will ever have. It's repetitive, slow, it's often ordinary, it requires patience, repair, boredom, tolerance, and long term thinking. Marriage is not an instant gratification machine. It's not a vending machine. Supernormal stimuli, however, undermines every one of these capacities.

The Voyage Cast (15:14.291)
It basically helps you think of marriage like it's a vending machine. The overstimulated person expects intensity to equal love, which is a total conflation, excitement to equal connection, emotion to equal meaning, which by God, these are not the same things. But real love is formed in rhythm, not intensity. And rhythm takes time to learn with another person for sure.

Marriage has quiet seasons. It has unremarkable days. And in fairness, it sometimes even has unresolved tensions and issues. And marriage, the repair in marriage, as I tell many of my couples, just takes time. There's no timeline for repair. This isn't failure. This is just normal, not supernormal. This is just normal life. But to an overstimulated nervous system, normal feels like insufficiency. Many marriages

do not fail because of incompatibility. I have believed this for a very long time. Now don't get me wrong, maybe that really is the case for some of you out there, but on this idea, they fail because people have lost the ability to live at the pace of real love and real life.

And when that happens, the consequences extend beyond relationships, don't they? They touch something much deeper in our heart, mind, and soul. They touch our humanity itself. And the ripple effect goes for generations.

Philosophically here, the human person was created for meaning, reflection, commitment, responsibility, virtue, silence, depth, relationship, and so much more. But super normal stimuli bypasses all of it. It's like a devil on your shoulder offering pleasure without any formation.

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escape without any growth, intensity, without any kind of meaning. A person who cannot tolerate boredom cannot contemplate. A person who cannot regulate their emotions cannot really love because they're going to be very confused. A person who cannot endure discomfort literally cannot mature.

This is not just a psychological issue. It's a philosophical crisis. We're losing the capacity for depth in our culture. I'm pretty sure a lot of you can see this out there, but this is not the end of the story, right? Because what has been trained can be retrained. That's the cool part. So how do we become human again? That's our ninth section here.

There is a hopeful truth. The nervous system can heal. Attention can be restored. Depth can be reclaimed. Meaning can be rediscovered. But it requires you returning to a normal human rhythm. And to do that, there's a lot of no's that have to happen, isn't there? Choosing silence. Protecting boredom. As weird as that sounds.

Because boy, don't know if you know this, but boredom is sort of the environment or the conditions for genius to flourish, for new ideas to develop.

You have to limit artificial stimulation and understand it is artificial. It's not real life. You have to learn to practice presence with somebody. And if you don't know what that means, get help. If you don't know what any of this stuff means, by the way, get help. Not like because you're, you know, so far gone that you can't do this, but we need help to relearn, to relearn patience, to relearn presence, to learn how to tolerate normal life on its own terms.

The Voyage Cast (19:13.672)
Because you're not created for constant intensity. You were created for human life. Now today we explored what super normal stimuli is and how it reshapes the human psyche and our culture and capacity for relationships. And in the next episode, we'll look at the cultural ideology that justified all of this. A worldview I will call the pseudo enlightenment.

One that dismantled the structures that create adults and reframed immaturity as freedom. I know that sounds big, but I'm pretty sure it's true. All right. Well, hey, this is The Voyage Cast and I am Eddie, your host. And this was episode one of a three part series. And this episode is titled The Supernormal Trap. Thank you so much for slowing down and thinking deeply with me. And if you did like this episode and it was meaningful to you as much as it was for me to put it together.

Share it with your friends. Let people know what's going on out there and how they can maybe start retraining their mind or follow us on this journey together. Share it, like it, subscribe to the channel. If you have questions, put them in the comments section and I'd love to interact with you because that creates more content for me to get out there, for people to learn from, because you're not the only one with those questions. You're not the only one with those comments. I can promise you that.

All right, that's it for today. Thank you so much for joining me and we'll see you next time.