The everyday lives of people living in a society flow according to their own internal rhythms. Most of the time, individuals live within their own worlds and generate happiness and peace largely by relating them to what they are able to do and the domains they can influence. Accordingly, the daily lives of large segments of society are built around repetition, continuity and limited spheres of impact. People produce meaning to the extent that they can act, and they preserve their hope within this framework. Politics and governance, too, flow within their own channels. Yes, politics affects life, but its rhythm and context are quite different. Domains such as the neighborhood, workplace, family, profession, art and education each have their own distinctive rhythms. This is why strengthening local forms of solidarity, face-to-face relationships and small-scale collaborations is so important. It is only within these spaces that people can feel themselves to be agents.

The widespread use and consumption of digital platforms by large segments of society have also transformed people’s relationship with politics and governance. As even the smallest details related to politics and administration are increasingly and continuously put on display on digital platforms, issues in which most people are not directly involved have begun to seep into the center of their everyday lives. In reality, the visibility of politics on digital platforms is not in itself the problem; rather, the source of the new problem lies in the fact that this visibility is presented in a contextless manner and through a constant language of crisis. Consequently, it steadily erodes people’s sense of hope and their perception of happiness. Moreover, the fact that misinformation spreads faster than accurate information on these platforms further entrenches the problem. Trolls, in any case, thrive precisely on this characteristic of digital platforms.

Yet politics and governance constitute a domain with their own distinct dynamics, calculations and maneuvers. In fact, there is a clear difference between the frequency (rhythm) of politics and the rhythm of people’s everyday lives. While politics operate through crisis, conflict, compromise, exception and dramatization, digital platforms continuously render this high-frequency, tense, and often performative political language visible. As a result, people are carried into a temporality that is out of sync with their own rhythms. As the number of those affected grows, this emotional state takes on a contagious quality, and people begin to poison one another without even realizing it. The language of anger and violence becomes increasingly widespread. Consequently, as the permeability between these two domains expands – typically in a negative way – through digital platforms, individuals are constantly exposed to the details of processes in which they are not agents, and are thus kept under their influence.

This situation generally produces two main consequences for large segments of society. The first is a widespread state of unhappiness and hopelessness. The second is a gradual distancing of people from what they themselves can do – that is, from their own spheres of responsibility. In this way, individuals’ relationship not only with politics but also with their own lives is transformed, and over time they come face to face with the loss of their own life rhythms. When people are constantly exposed to events in which they do not participate in decision-making processes and cannot alter the outcomes – in other words, when they are passively drawn into events they cannot meaningfully intervene in – this produces a classic form of learned helplessness. As hopelessness and unhappiness increase, individuals’ motivation to retreat into their own areas of responsibility weakens, giving rise to a condition akin to an inability to act.

This effect of digital platforms generally operates through mechanisms of attention hijacking and emotional overload. Attention hijacking is commonly used to describe a situation in which an individual’s attention is systematically seized by content that they did not choose, cannot control, and often cannot directly influence. Because digital platforms aim less to inform users than to keep them on the platform, they prioritize content with the highest potential to capture attention. Politics, in this sense, is one of the domains that supplies the greatest amount of material to these platforms. Since political cases are typically presented through the language of crisis, conflict, threat and scandal, politics is removed from being a domain encountered at specific times and within particular contexts in the natural flow of everyday life, and is instead transformed into a continuous object of attention loaded with negative connotations. As attention slips out of the individual’s control and into the hands of the platform, people ultimately become unable to choose what to believe in or what to focus on.

The mechanism operating simultaneously with this process is emotional overload. As people are continuously exposed to political content that triggers feelings of anger, anxiety, fear, disappointment and threats, they gradually lose their capacity to process these emotions. Emotions that should be interpreted and transformed within the flow of everyday life instead accumulate on top of one another and reach an insoluble intensity. At this point, the individual either becomes emotionally numb or is drawn into a state of constant unease. In both cases, because emotions begin to function as paralyzing forces rather than as drivers of action, the person loses their capacity to act – that is, their capacity to be an agent.

For these reasons, the state of mind experienced by large segments of society has today become a widespread condition in most countries. Digital platforms function both as carriers and intensifiers of this condition. States of unhappiness, hopelessness, inability to act and loss of rhythm have become a shared global denominator across societies, even when they differ greatly in political, cultural and economic contexts. Therefore, the issue is not a crisis unique to any particular country; it has been transformed into a common problem of contemporary societies.

The core problem lies in the individual’s growing withdrawal from public responsibilities. Accordingly, there is a need to reinforce the individual’s capacity to be an agent once again. In short, people must start again from themselves, re-centering the domains in which they can act and exert influence. They must strive to fulfill their responsibilities to the extent of their capacities. Individuals who regain their sense of agency will also be more effective in the public sphere. One who does not begin with oneself, and who does not act on what lies within one’s own responsibility cannot credibly claim moral authority in addressing others. Without such an effort, a persistent state of dissatisfaction and complaint will, unfortunately, continue to spread.