On psychic suffering, social media, and the architecture of our attention
Few have sensed the spiritual hunger of our time as precisely as Eckhart Tolle. Since the publication of The Power of Now in 1997, he has become one of the most widely recognised spiritual teachers in the world. His work has been translated into dozens of languages, his lectures are watched across the globe, and millions follow his brief meditative reflections on social media. This success is remarkable. It suggests that his message strikes a chord that is strung taut in our present age.
The core of Tolle’s vision is simple and yet radical: the present moment can set us free. But something stands in the way. In The Power of Now, he introduces the concept of the “pain body”: a psychic structure in which old emotions, unprocessed experiences, and ingrained negative thought patterns accumulate. The pain body lives, according to Tolle, on attention. It is activated when we fully identify with our thoughts and emotions – when we believe that the inner voice which condemns us or instils fear is truly who we are.
Everyone knows this voice. The relentless stream of commentary inside our heads: that we fall short, that we must prove ourselves, that others do not see us or value us. When this stream goes unnoticed and is followed automatically, a vicious cycle takes hold. Thoughts amplify emotions; emotions feed new thoughts – and so the pain body grows. It is a voracious monster – Tolle himself calls it a parasite – ceaselessly seeking out our negative thoughts to feed on. In Tolle’s analysis, this is the source of much psychic suffering: stress, burnout, relational conflict, aggression, and depressive states.
Tolle’s enormous popularity points to something that is difficult to deny: psychic suffering is no longer a marginal phenomenon. In many Western countries, a substantial proportion of the population will at some point experience anxiety disorders, depression, or burnout. Why this should be so is not easily answered. Modern prosperity and medical care have made life, objectively speaking, safer and more comfortable than ever before. And yet there seems to be, at the same time, a growing experience of inner emptiness and mental pressure.
Against this backdrop, it is worth turning our attention to a phenomenon that emerged almost simultaneously with this development: social media.
X and Our Instinct
One of the most distinctive platforms in this landscape is X, long known as Twitter. When the platform launched in 2006, it had a striking constraint: messages could not exceed a hundred and forty characters. This limitation was originally technical – it corresponded to the length of text messages – but quickly acquired cultural significance. The result was a style of communication that is often instinctive: short, direct reactions, frequently impulsive, rarely nuanced, devoid of context. Twitter thus became a kind of permanent public thought-flash. People share not so much fully formed ideas as immediate reactions.
Neurologically, this means that social media continually entice us to react from the fast, instinctive part of our psyche – the part that, in evolutionary terms, is responsible for immediate action. The slower, reflective layer of our consciousness, where nuance, self-relativisation, and integration take place, is given far less room.
When one views this through the lens of Tolle’s concept, an illuminating but also disquieting hypothesis emerges: social media constitute an environment in which the pain body can be continually activated. Anger, indignation, jealousy, fear, and self-criticism receive fresh fuel again and again. Every conflict, every insult, every comparison with others can trigger a new wave of emotional reaction.
Yet the affinity runs deeper than analogy. What Tolle describes from the perspective of the individual psyche – attention that fastens onto pain and thereby sustains itself – and what social media embody technologically are not comparable. They are the same phenomenon. Tolle described the mechanism; social media have built the infrastructure for it.
But is this not a somewhat far-reaching hypothesis? Surely X and the others are simply media? The term “social media” sounds neutral enough at first hearing. A medium is, after all, merely a channel, an instrument that transmits information – much like a newspaper or a television programme. But in the case of digital platforms, this neutrality is deceptive. Social media are not merely passive channels. They are complex systems that actively govern which information we see, how often we return, and how long we stay. Their algorithms are designed to optimise behaviour, and that behaviour has a single objective: to maximise engagement.
The reason is straightforward. Attention is the business model. The longer users remain on the platform, the more advertisements can be served and the more valuable the platform becomes to investors and advertisers. This means that social media have a vested interest in amplifying emotionally charged content. Posts that provoke anger, indignation, or strong identification spread faster and keep people engaged longer than nuanced analysis. This explains why discussions on platforms such as X so frequently escalate – not necessarily because people have grown worse, but because the technical environment rewards precisely this behaviour.
None of this diminishes the fact that social media have democratised access to information, given citizens a voice, and rendered power structures more transparent. Much journalistic work is disseminated and corrected more swiftly today thanks to these networks. But that does not mean that democratisation or truth is the primary purpose of these platforms. Those are means rather than ends. The purpose is attention.
Once one grasps this, the debates about the supposed dangers of social media – “fake news,” political polarisation – begin to seem curiously beside the point. These are real problems, yet they may not touch the core, which lies in the psychological infrastructure of these platforms. For the impact of disinformation has acquired a fundamentally different significance through digital technology.
In toxicology, there is an old principle that dates back to Paracelsus: nothing is in itself a poison; only the dose makes a thing poisonous. Water, oxygen, even vitamins – in small quantities they are essential to life; in high concentrations they can be harmful or even lethal. Perhaps we should view the phenomenon of disinformation in a comparable light. Falsehoods, rumours, and manipulation are as old as human communities; no society has ever been entirely free of deception or propaganda. The problem of our time is not that such information exists, but that the dosage has changed explosively. Digital platforms make it possible for misleading messages to spread worldwide within minutes, and for small, well-organised groups to achieve a reach that was once reserved for major media institutions. In such an environment, disinformation becomes dangerous not because it exists, but because it circulates in a concentration that a healthy public discourse can scarcely absorb.
The Dose Makes the Poison
This insight shifts the question. No longer: who is causing the polarisation? Or: who is spreading the wrong information? But rather: what kind of environment makes this behaviour so probable? Only when we dare to pose this question does it become apparent that much of what we are fighting may not be the cause but the symptom – of a communicative structure that activates precisely that part of us from which the greater share of psychic suffering arises.
For what social media do is not fundamentally new. The systematic activation of the limbic system – appealing to fear, desire, insecurity, the need to belong – has been the basic principle of marketing and advertising for decades. We have normalised this principle, elevated it to a science, and never seriously called it into question. Social media did not invent this principle; they changed the dosage. Where advertising was once an occasional stimulus – a poster by the roadside, a commercial between two television programmes – it is now a permanent, algorithmically optimised environment that surrounds us twenty-four hours a day. The same substance, but in a concentration that does something fundamentally different to the human psyche. Perhaps the real question, then, is not how to regulate social media, but whether the assumption that underlies them – that it is legitimate to systematically steer human behaviour through the limbic system, so long as a product or a platform profits from it – can be sustained much longer.