Whiplash, Withdrawal, and the Permanent Brace for Impact

what social media is doing to us, part 3

Part III: Emotional Whiplash and the Collapse of Inner Coherence

In the first part of this series, I argued that social media doesn’t just expose psychological fragmentation — it engineers it. In the second, I showed how the algorithm monetizes our worst selves by rewarding performance over presence, rage over reflection, and coherence over truth. (Link to the unified theory from which all three parts stem is here.)

Now we turn to the engine that powers both.

Emotional whiplash is no mere byproduct of social media. It is its architecture — not a flaw, not a mishap, but a deliberate mechanism that renders us reactive, unmoored, and too overwhelmed to reason clearly. Joy, horror, laughter, grief, outrage, lust, and despair — all in thirty seconds. All in the same feed.

We aren’t built for this. Not neurologically. Not morally. Not spiritually.

This installment is about what happens when you’re pulled — again and again, and faster each time — between incompatible emotional states until you forget what it’s like to feel anything all the way through. Until you stop trusting your gut. Until your nervous system becomes a hostage, and your sense of self goes with it.

This is what emotional whiplash does.

And it’s doing it to all of us. Yes, all of us. Including you.

Some of you are probably thinking this sounds hyperbolic. That social media doesn’t do this to you. That you scroll without reacting, that you don’t feel whiplash at all. If anything, you feel nothing. It’s just background noise.

You’re just curating the news. Staying informed!

But if that’s true — if you can be exposed to a never-ending carousel of joy, cruelty, triumph, grief, absurdity, terror, and snark, all in a ten-minute window, and not feel anything — that’s not a sign that you’re okay. That’s not resilience. That’s shutdown.

And shutdown is worse.

We didn’t evolve to absorb the intimate details of human suffering on every corner of the globe, every day, forever. Our nervous systems were not built to hold the pain of millions — or to pretend we do. There is nothing noble about becoming unfeeling.

There is nothing healthy about scrolling past a beheading, a genocide, a suicide note, a dance meme, and a joke about your favorite TV show without your body registering the difference.

You do not emerge untouched. You emerge numbed.

And numbness is not the absence of harm — it is its silent testimony.

Morning Samples for Review

On the mornings of Sunday, May 11, 2025 (Mother’s Day) and Tuesday, May 13, 2025, I did the same experiment. I set a timer for five minutes and scrolled Twitter. I watched all the videos (except where noted), and clicked on replies only where noted.

Here is a sample of ten minutes worth of Twitter, from someone who follows mostly center-right and farther right accounts. The handful of center-left and farther left accounts I follow are mostly limited to people who hold political office or have large platforms.

• A video wherein a dog nudged a security camera so he could go steal food without being seen and a cat nudged it back, just in time to catch him.

• A ukelele cover of “Heil Hitler,” the new song by Kanye West, which I did not watch.

• Someone I’ve followed for years and had many pleasant conversations with arguing that the Holocaust was mostly fake and at most a hundred thousand people died, but that was Churchill’s fault. I clicked and saw three other people I recognized, and previously thought of as sane, thanking this person for having “red pilled” them with “the truth about the Jews.”

• A video of a golden retriever who raised three abandoned tiger cubs.

• A video of a Muslim family waving a blood-stained sheet to prove the daughter they married off the night before was a virgin. I should not have watched, but I did. Replies included several avowed Christians supporting this as one of the few things Muslims get right, along with what should happen when a man is “defrauded” by not “getting” a virgin.

• A video of a Muslim mother showing her daughters how to kill both Americans and Jews if they ever get the chance.

• A Happy Mother’s Day gif.

• A tweet about the evil of the Constitution. After guessing based on the punctuation, spelling, and syntax, I clicked on the profile. This one was a Christian Nationalist who objects to the evil of being permitted to blaspheme the Bible in the name of freedom.

• A tweet wherein a conservative Christian married woman who has asserted that she’s a patriot and a conservative Christian, not a “nationalist Conservative” is told that she deserves to die at the end of a rope for being a Commie traitor.

• A tweet calling Israelis parasites who would do the world a favor by their mass suicide.

• A tweet with a screenshot of a vile threat that a trans activist sent to the tweeter. Replies were mostly supportive and encouraging.

• A tweet arguing that colorblind meritocracy is and always was a stupid idea, and the most important priority for conservatives should be to repeal the Civil Rights Act so that white men can be given preferential treatment in education and hiring, as putting everyone else back in their place is the only way that America will ever be made great again.

• A tweet from a major conservative commentator arguing that Marx was a fine writer and that he was right to point out the problems with capitalist society — there’s nothing wrong with admiring the tools the Communists used or picking them up; just with using them to achieve the wrong aims.

• A tweet about the evil of the Constitution. After guessing based on the punctuation, spelling, and syntax, I clicked on the profile. This one was a Woke Leftist who objects to the lack of protections for marginalized people.

• A picture of a little boy who should have turned 11 today but died in his sleep three years ago. The tweeter was someone whose child’s life was saved by the boy’s family’s decision to donate his organs.

• A quote-tweet reminding everyone that Israel buys weapons from the US — they are not given them — followed by dozens of replies calling the QT’er a Jew, advising him to get Jewish (male genitalia) out of his mouth, and other such vileness.

• A tweet welcoming the refugees from South Africa and commenting positively on how they arrived waving American flags.

• A tweet from a major conservative podcast host asserting that “classical Marxism is way more based than the gay capitalism we have now.”

• Several arguments over whether something in a photo is a wadded-up piece of Kleenex or a bag of cocaine.

• A tweet asserting the stupidity and evil of colorblind meritocracy. After mentally guessing it was from a Woke Leftist who objects to the enshrining of white supremacy such efforts entail, I clicked on the profile. I guessed wrong; this one was from a member of the right’s mirror-image brigade.

• Multiple tweets with screenshots of Trump’s announcement of the EO around drug prices, each with multiple replies arguing about the wisdom of price controls.

• A happy tweet about the last living American hostage to be released from Gaza, with multiple replies calling him a liar and a crisis actor, and several others asserting that if his stories are true he deserved it because history didn’t start on October 7, 2023.

• A tweet showing the young man who made it to the finals in the women’s high, long, and triple jump competitions in California over the weekend, with several replies indicating that those recognizing that the athlete is a young man are hateful monsters who deserve to die in fires, quite slowly and torturously.

• A video in which a single man who just bought a baby from a surrogate picks the child up for the first time and shows that he doesn’t know you have to support an infant’s head.

• A very cool problem from one of the math accounts, with a pattern that I will explore and try to prove soon.

  

  Emotional Responses

  What would healthy emotional responses to these tweets be? In order, I think that the responses a healthy person would have would be:

• Dog and cat security camera teamwork: amusement, warmth, delight at animal cleverness.

• Kanye West song cover: disgust, disbelief, possibly sadness or concern; appropriate decision to skip.

• Holocaust denial by a longtime mutual: shock, betrayal, confusion, grief, moral revulsion, possibly nausea.

• Golden retriever raising tiger cubs: joy, tenderness, curiosity, awe at cross-species caregiving.

• Bloodied sheet “virginity proof” video: horror, sorrow, moral outrage, possibly a sickened stomach; a bodily sense that something ancient and cruel is still being enacted.

• Mother training daughters to kill Americans and Jews: horror, sadness for the children, moral clarity that this is child abuse and a tragedy.

• Happy Mother’s Day gif: warmth, maybe a small smile.

• Constitution is evil — Christian Nationalist version: frustration, eye-roll, a desire to rebut or dismiss.

• Woman told to die for being a “Commie traitor”: alarm, protective instinct, grief over the state of discourse.

• Anti-Israeli suicide encouragement: disgust, moral revulsion, fear, nausea, even rage.

• Support for recipient of threat: anger at the tweet in the screenshot, followed by relief, encouragment, happiness at the replies.

• Repeal Civil Rights Act tweet: shock, disgust, maybe a defensive anger; sorrow for the cultural moment.

• Major conservative praising Marx: intellectual confusion, curiosity, wariness, maybe suspicion.

• Constitution is evil — Woke Leftist version: eye-roll, frustration, sense of déjà vu, but also a flash of empathy or curiosity.

• Boy who should’ve turned 11 — organ donor story: grief, gratitude, reverence, a moment of real human weight.

• Israel buys weapons tweet and antisemitic replies: sorrow, horror, anger, moral disgust, protectiveness.

• South African refugee tweet: hope, national pride, guarded optimism.

• “Classical Marxism” > “gay capitalism”: confusion, eye-roll, desire to log off and go for a walk.

• Kleenex vs cocaine photo war: mild amusement, irritation, dismay at what qualifies as “discourse.”

• Colorblind meritocracy — from the Right: confusion, perhaps interest at first, then dismay or sadness.

• Trump EO price control screenshots: interest, policy curiosity, then fatigue at reply section combativeness.

• Hostage released from Gaza — replies: relief, joy, followed immediately by fury or heartbreak at the dehumanization in the replies.

• Man in women’s high jump — replies: exasperation, protectiveness, maybe rage depending on how personal this issue feels.

• Surrogacy/newborn head video: concern for the baby, sadness at commodification, maybe unease.

• Cool math problem: delight, curiosity, a spike of creative engagement — maybe the only clean dopamine hit in the feed.

What did I actually feel? Given I was doing this somewhat detached, to get material for this essay, my responses are tainted. I was mostly numb, but the praise of Marx from the right gave me a sick feeling of inevitable doom. I ended the second session a few seconds early because the math problem was such a positive note to end on.

What Twitter Does To You

You can’t live in that feed and come out whole.

Even if you think you’re immune — if you’re just “scrolling,” just “keeping up with the news” — you’re not. No one is.

Because Twitter doesn’t just show you content. It puts your nervous system through the spin cycle: horror, laughter, grief, rage, envy, awe, despair, delight — none of them asked for, none of them chosen. There’s no arc, no throughline, no resolution. Just one gut-punch after another, each yanking you in a different direction before you’ve had a chance to metabolize the last.

And that’s the point. That’s the design.

As I argued in Part I, this kind of chaotic input fragments us — it splits our experience of ourselves into disconnected pieces. We lose the thread of our inner coherence. Instead of inhabiting a stable sense of self, we ping between fragments, reacting from whatever emotional mode got activated last. The result is not complexity. It’s disintegration.

In Part II, I showed how the algorithm feeds on that disintegration. How it doesn’t just reward your loudest, angriest fragments — it teaches you to lead with them. The more you perform, the more you’re reinforced. And over time, the performance becomes reflex. Then identity.

But emotional whiplash is what makes both fragmentation and performance sustainable.

Without emotional whiplash, the act of performing your most dysregulated self might burn out quickly. It would feel too weird, too disconnected from reality, too false. You’d notice the toll. You’d take a breath. Maybe log off.

But emotional whiplash keeps you too off-balance to notice.

It floods your nervous system with so many contradictory inputs, so quickly, that you lose the capacity to sit with any of them. You don’t feel anything all the way through — not horror, not joy, not grief, not humor. Everything is truncated. Everything is interrupted.

Your system doesn’t integrate; it braces.

Over time, that bracing becomes the baseline. And you don’t even realize you’re doing it. You think you’re just “used to it.” You think you’re “numb in a good way.”

But numb isn’t neutral. Numb is a trauma response.

And when numb becomes your default, you’re not protecting yourself from damage — you’re proof that it’s already happened.

Because here’s the quiet, terrible truth: you should feel something.

You should feel something when a Holocaust is denied, or a child’s death is shared, or a woman is told she deserves to die because she married the wrong kind of Christian. You should also feel something when a dog outsmarts a camera or when a tiger cub purrs in a retriever’s lap. You should feel something when a math pattern delights you.

You were built to.

But Twitter doesn’t want you to feel. It wants you to click. To react. To stay.

And the only way to do that — to keep metabolizing emotional chaos without collapsing — is to start suppressing your own responses. Not deliberately, but neurologically. Automatically. You begin to flatten your emotional range just to survive the input load.

Eventually, your instincts get scrambled. Your moral compass flickers. Your gut doesn’t know what to signal anymore — because it’s being pulled in ten directions per minute, and all of them are urgent.

This is what emotional whiplash does. It doesn’t just confuse you. It erodes the possibility of inner coherence. You stop trusting your feelings. You stop knowing what you think. You forget how to stay with anything — a thought, a question, a person — long enough to feel it through.

And the longer you stay in that feed, the more natural that state begins to feel.

Which is exactly how people lose themselves.

Not all at once.

Not in a blaze of ideology or a single viral meltdown.

But in a thousand small ruptures — a thousand micro-moments of emotional dissonance, each one asking more than your nervous system can give.

And each one leaving you a little more fragmented than you were before.

Knowing More Than We’re Built To Know

Part of the problem is evolutionary.

We weren’t designed to know what’s happening everywhere.

For most of human history, our emotional bandwidth was calibrated to a village. A clan. A couple dozen people, maybe a few hundred. Our nervous systems evolved to respond to the pain, joy, danger, and death of those we could see, touch, help, or grieve.

But now we know about everything — all at once.

We know when a child is kidnapped in Idaho. When a genocide is unfolding in real time halfway across the globe. When a celebrity overdoses. When a bomb hits a hospital. When a dog rescues a kitten. When a woman dies in childbirth because of a broken hospital protocol. When a teenager in South Korea posts a perfect dance.

And knowing does something to us — even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Even when we feel nothing.

Because numbness isn’t neutral. It’s not a shrug. It’s not a failure to care. It’s your body saying, I can’t hold this much.

And yet, here’s the paradox: the fact that you know still matters.

Even if your nervous system can’t respond the way it should — even if you scroll past atrocity without a flicker — your awareness has still registered it, somewhere. And your reaction, or your lack of one, becomes part of your moral landscape. It shapes who you become.

We weren’t built for omniscience.

But we are accountable for what we do with what we know.

Even if the knowing breaks us a little.

Even if the knowing costs us the wholeness we never quite learned how to keep.

We Cannot Stay Here

If all of this feels bleak — it’s because it is.

What emotional whiplash does isn’t just personal. It’s civilizational. It makes us harder to live with, harder to love, harder to know — even, or especially, to ourselves.

It breaks the thread. It breaks all the threads — between stimulus and reflection, between knowledge and care, between knowing and acting.

We scroll past horror and wonder and never pause long enough to feel any of it, let alone do anything about it.

We are not well.

And we cannot live like this forever.

I haven’t come close to reclaiming wholeness for myself. So I’m not going to pretend I can teach anyone else how to do it. That’s not what the next part of this series is for.

What I can do is go deeper into how and why these incentives work the way they do — what makes them so sticky, so rewarding, so hard to step away from — and try to help you see the mechanisms more clearly. Because if you can see them, you can make more conscious, more deliberate choices about how you use social media, or whether to use it at all.

And I’ll share a few changes I’ve made in my own life. They won’t be prescriptions. I’m weird. I have complex trauma. My nervous system is uniquely shot. What helps me may not help you.

But I’ll offer what I can.

For though our wounds may differ, the distortion spares none. No one can navigate social media — in its present form — and remain wholly sane, wholly anchored, wholly human.

No more than someone could stare through a kaleidoscope and tell you they’re seeing the world clearly.

It doesn’t work that way.

And the longer we pretend it does, the more we lose.

Part IV will be about what it means to see clearly — even for a moment — and what small things we might do with that clarity before it vanishes again.

Because even a flicker of sanity, held long enough, might be the start of something else.

Something quieter. Something real.

Something like wholeness.

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Part I focused on psychological fragmentation, Part II on algorithmic reinforcement, and Part IV on defeating the misery machine.

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