Anesthetizing yourself lets the body temporarily block out pain so it can endure the most excruciating part of surgery — from something as small as a root canal to something as significant as an epidural birth, all of them rely on anesthesia. In painless childbirth, the anesthetic dose has to be carefully matched to the intensity of the mother’s contractions; a single overdose can leave her unable to push on her own, putting both her and the baby in danger. On the battlefield, dosing isn’t nearly as strict, which is why wounded soldiers who are later discharged often end up struggling with drug dependence — a single period of overuse can take decades to wean off.

Beyond the physical pain that needs numbing, psychological pain is often more insidious — and far more addictive. We’re told from childhood to stay away from the three classic vices: pornography, gambling, and drugs. But we rarely stop to ask why these three demands have persisted for thousands of years. Once you step into the real world, you realize that being alive isn’t nearly as beautiful as you’d imagined. A huge chunk of life is spent struggling through pain, and a smaller chunk is spent on fleeting pleasures that help you forget that pain. In the end, you give up trying to think the pain through, and throw yourself into the arms of dopamine-fueled painkilling.

The Bible describes humanity’s most primal seven deadly sins — pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. Indulging in any of these emotions floods the brain with dopamine and briefly lifts a person into a kind of super-ego state, letting them forget the wounded id underneath. As technology has advanced, more and more modern tools are being deployed as something close to potent mental anesthetics, catching people in an endless emotional chain reaction.

The combination of social networks and recommendation algorithms has pulled most people into a kind of virtual anesthesia. They forget their psychological pain, and through constant, brief, frequent hits of dopamine, they gradually lose a person’s most precious faculties: insight and judgment. They sink deeper into a virtual super-ego and lose touch with their real id. The moment they step away, they become just as irritable and hollow as drug addicts — needing to pour more and more time and energy into numbing themselves. They slowly turn into something like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, locked into compulsive, stereotyped behavior, until the soul quietly dissolves inside the body.

The current explosion of AI video generation is only making this worse — soon, everyone will be able to live inside their own personal virtual utopia. Once, on a train to Shanghai, after lights-out, I overheard a little girl repeatedly telling another kid she’d just met that the kid was a “soy-sauce duck” (jiangbanya — a Chinese cured-duck dish that became an internet meme thanks to a viral AI-generated video). It wasn’t until I later watched the AI videos she was riffing on that I realized the age of mass anesthesia is already here — and many people probably don’t even realize they’re already hooked.