Why the Fuck Is Just Existing a Job Now??
Leonard Cohen, Technostress, Cognitive Collapse & Soft Fascination
The first time my husband and I met in person we airbnb’d in the beautiful neighbourhood of Haus Khaz in New Delhi where, nestled away from a whole miasma of societal condemnation, he showed me a documentary of young Leonard Cohen going on tour.
He’s brandishing his guitar, smiling his slightly-jagged half-grin, kissing his harmonica, weeping and laughing into the microphone, and of course wooing women left right and center.
There’s a part near the end of the documentary however that really struck me. And that’s the part where Cohen finds himself unable to perform. Before a sea of people who adore him.
He starts to sing but stops midway:
“I feel that I’m cheating you. I’ll try it again and if it doesn’t work I’ll stop…there is no reason to mutilate a song just to save face.”
He goes backstage and cries for some time, smiling, wiping his tears, sniffling, as the audience outside cheers uproariously. He returns but can’t begin to sing again:
“Sometimes one is raised off the ground, and some nights one can’t get off the ground…and there is no point lying that tonight we haven’t been getting off the ground.”
It didn’t matter to him how big the crowd was, or how loving, he said he’d refund their money. If he couldn’t feel the connection with his songs, he would not dishonor them (neither the songs nor the audience).
I don’t think, before that, I’d seen this level of…gentle authenticity anywhere. Of course there was an artistic fervor here, but while there was so much art, any sort of artifice was conspicuous by its absence.
In the early days of being a “person online”, this is kind of how I used to feel, both about myself and those I came across. Not that I'm LC nor you nor anyone here, but we are all little artists, small gods of our artistic creations, and the internet was our little stage in multiple dimensions across nations beyond borders and the doors were opened and here we all were, ready to fall, to rise, to connect.
Honestly, without the veil of social constraints and expectations.
My people, what the fuck happened?
Well, part of it is that platforms started shaping us more than we shaped them.
In 2012, Anil Dash wrote about “The Web We Lost”. The early web let people create, remix, link and thus outwards. The modern web traps us in ourselves (and not our real selves, rather think of a voodoo doll version of you with pins in it). Engagement’s rewarded. Vulnerability’s commodified. Intimacy’s filtered through analytics dashboards.
We used to show up online because we wanted to. Now we show up because we have to. For relevance, reach…connection that isn’t actually connection but a ghost-echo of it, an algorithm-approved simulation. What used to be playful — think tumblr moodboards at 2 a.m., long messy comment threads, ugly fonts and beautiful friendships — became professionalized…monetized…and now, frankly, weaponized.
& despite being infinitely grateful for the community I’m building here on Beautiful Losers…
I still feel so lost these days...is the age of the true internet over?
I think to myself, “should I have started my Instagram or this newsletter or just about anything in general long ago? And then I immediately feel sick because...
what I’m (and so many of us are) experiencing is more than just creative guilt…
there is an actual name for the ambient dread we feel when we simply “log on” (lol let’s be honest, we’re always on in some way):
Technostress
There it is, the future-drug we never asked for. Technostress isn’t burnout or digital fatigue alone, it’s stress born from perpetual connectivity, constant notifications, and the feeling that being offline equals invisibility.
Wonderful Wikipedia explains:
People…feel a compulsive need to stay connected and share constant updates, feel forced to respond to work-related information in real-time, or engage in habitual multi-tasking. They feel compelled to work faster because information flows faster, and have little time for sustained thinking and creative analysis.
A 2025 study1 tries to figure out how to reduce technostress, elucidating on “cognitive overload theory”. That is, the accumulation of alerts, tab-switching, remembering too many half-finished things making it harder to manage even basic tasks, let alone make art or think expansively.
It shouldn’t be about this...creating art, writing, that life of letters I always wanted as a kid, a teenager...it’s right here now, in my lap, my hands, and...I can’t help but feel I’m letting it slip away.
Some part of me still believes there are remnants of the old living internet left. Not sure if you can even remember it, even for me it’s a dreamlike fog.
For those of you that never experienced it, just know that it was something special...for one, there was the promise of being able to reach across space and time and find that which you did not have the luxury to have all around you: connections that weren’t based on proximity, words echoing across continents, a friend in the dark, and so much resonance.
How did they convince us all this pales against bloody metrics and algorithms?
What about joy?
What about making weird shit with your friends? What about writing things no one might read? If even that starts to feel like labor…like something that has to justify itself through output or audience or branding…then what’s left?
That same study I cited above talks about another theory that I much prefer the sound of: Attention restoration theory (ART):
ART posits that individuals can restore their cognitive capacities through […] environments […] that promote indirect attention. Environments that evoke soft fascination — such as natural settings — enable the mind to recover from directed attention fatigue, which is critical in high-stress workplaces where technostress often prevails.
I love this phrase here: “soft fascination.” It rings to me as the direct opposite of doomscrolling. The kind of attention that doesn’t ask for anything in return. Forget likes, shares…conversion metrics…not even a coherent thought.
Just a quiet yes from your nervous system. Your gaze lingering on a leaf, or a line, or a pan of milk starting to boil for tea…
Makes me wonder…
Maybe the old internet felt good because it was softly fascinating. Because it didn’t demand we be useful or particularly legible. Because you could disappear for a week and come back and someone had left a comment on your blog like a candle in the dark.
Now, when you take a break2 — rest, turn off, give back to yourself — and return…the platforms actively punish you. The algorithm treats you like a ghost. These systems don’t reward presence (no, nothing so close to actual human reality), rather they throw dog-biscuits at our obedience3. Remember that.
So you open the app and the app opens you, guts you the fuck open actually, everything good spilling out, all the shit bustling in. And suddenly you’re split between multiple selves…thrown across platforms and modalities of communication.
How can we “contain multitudes” when there is no crucible to begin with….no true “I” to hold all that chaos and contradiction and beauty and terror?
I’m not sure how to end this. I’m not a researcher or a social scientist or an internet expert or a self-help guru. I am sometimes a poet, sometimes a poser, and most often a confused 30 year old trying her best.
So, I’ll end with these words by the man I started this whole thing with, the lovely Leonard himself4:
"Finally there's no conflict between things, finally everything is reconciled but not where we live. This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess and that's what I mean by Hallelujah.
[…]
You're not going to be able to work this thing out — you're not going to be able to set — this realm does not admit to revolution — there's no solution to this mess.
The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say "Look, I don't understand a fucking thing at all — Hallelujah!" That's the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.
Rahmi, K. H., Fahrudin, A., Supriyadi, T., & Herlina, E. (2025). Technostress and cognitive fatigue: Reducing digital strain for improved employee well-being: A literature review. Multidisciplinary Reviews, 8(12).
Calvano, E., Haghtalab, N., Vitercik, E., & Zhao, E. (2024). Algorithmic content selection and the impact of user disengagement.
Hödl, T., Myrach, T. Content Creators Between Platform Control and User Autonomy. Bus Inf Syst Eng 65, 497–519 (2023).
“How the Heart Approaches What it Yearns” | Interview with Leonard Cohen presented by John McKenna. RTE Ireland, May 9 & 12, 1988, Transcribed by Martin Godwyn
Exactly this! I miss the purity of the earlier age of social media - when it felt more connective and less performative. I don't know how to get that back, but it feels important to ponder.
Technostress is so real. Getting off instagram as an influencer definitely reduced it for me, but it feels near impossible to escape