What happens when feeling becomes too costly?
Numbness is a short work of literary nonfiction about the quiet ways people learn to dull sensation. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes without noticing at all. Through personal reflection and cultural observation, it explores numbness as a strategy: how it protects us, how it helps us cope, and how it slowly becomes habitual.
This essay asks why it exists at all. Are humans meant to be fully present all the time? Or is some degree of emotional dulling built into us as a safeguard against a world that is often overwhelming?
Discussing habit, choice, and awareness, Numbness examines what is lost when avoidance becomes automatic.
This is not a self-help guide or a call to action. It is an inquiry into how disconnection becomes normal, and what it may cost us when we stop noticing it.
