Addiction to Over(living)

To what extent are we still resisting the world — and to what extent has the world convinced us that we only know how to exist when we are fighting against it?

We are addicted to surviving, and this fact worsens with historically marginalized groups. To what extent is resistance also fueled by hypervigilance and the obsession with nonconformity?

We are addicted to surviving. And perhaps this is one of the deepest effects of a society built on historical inequalities: turning the state of alert into a mode of existence.

The pandemic was one of the most revealing events of our generation. It did not create all the problems we face today, but it accelerated processes already underway: the precarization of work, isolation, the widening of inequalities, the mental health crisis, and an ever‑growing dependence on digital technologies for work, for connecting, for consuming information, and for existing socially.

Suddenly, we were confronted with a collective threat. Leaving home could represent risk, the other could be a source of contagion, and the future, already uncertain for many, became even more unpredictable. The body began to be monitored, the death toll began to occupy our screens daily, and the sense of emergency became part of the routine.

Survival, for several years, stopped appearing to be an experience limited to certain groups and became a collective feeling. But, as with almost everything in an unequal society, the pandemic did not affect everyone in the same way. For historically marginalized groups, it overlapped existing vulnerabilities. Black people, LGBTQIA+, women, Indigenous peoples and economically vulnerable populations did not enter that crisis from the same starting point. Racism, economic inequality, discrimination, precarious work and unequal access to health meant that, for many, the 2020 emergency merely intensified a state of alert that was already part of everyday experience.

The World Health Organization estimated that, in the first year of the pandemic, the global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by about 25%. The crisis, therefore, did not end when restrictions were eased. Its effects remained in bodies, relationships, work, and in the way we began to relate to the future.

It is precisely at this point that the idea of hypervigilance helps us understand what happened. Although the term was not coined by a single person, it gained an important formulation in trauma studies through the work of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner, who studied the effects of war on veterans. Kardiner observed that trauma does not necessarily end when danger disappears: people who had experienced extreme situations could continue organizing their perception of the world based on the possibility of a new threat. The war had ended, but the body remained prepared for it.

Perhaps this is a powerful image for thinking about our time. The pandemic has passed, restrictions have ended and life has returned to the streets. But have our bodies received the information that the emergency is over? For historically marginalized groups, the question is even more complex, because the sense of threat did not begin in 2020. The pandemic did not create this vigilance; it encountered bodies that, at different levels, had already learned to stay alert.

At the same time, while the physical world was closing, the digital world was expanding. The pandemic accelerated our definitive entry into a logic of permanent connection. In 2021, there were already about 4.2 billion social‑media users worldwide, an impressive growth compared to the previous year, driven precisely by the isolation period. A few years later, that number would exceed 5 billion. We did not just go online. We began to work on it, relate on it, seek entertainment on it, receive news on it, and increasingly, build our identity in front of it.

This produced an important transformation in our psychological experience. The threat no longer had a schedule. Previously, a news item could be consumed at specific times of the day. Now it arrives as a notification, video, comment, meme, opinion, debate, and indignation. One crisis overlays another without necessarily giving us time to process any of them. In 2024, the typical social‑media user spent, on average, more than two hours per day connected to these platforms. The problem may not be just the time we spend before screens, but the emotional state we remain in while we are on them.

It is at this point that hypervigilance gains a contemporary dimension. Psychologically, being alert to danger can be a protective mechanism. For historically marginalized groups, this vigilance is often not a choice or paranoia: it is a survival technology. One must observe the environment, gauge words, notice who is watching, understand which spaces are safe, and anticipate potential violence. The body has historically learned that lowering guard can have consequences.

The problem is that what starts as a survival mechanism can, over time, become a psychic structure. And after the pandemic we find a technological environment perfectly primed to feed this state of alertness. There is always a new crisis, a new political threat, a new violence, a new war, a new accusation, a new setback. There is always something demanding our attention, our reaction, and our stance.

Indignation, which historically is a fundamental tool of political transformation, has also begun to operate within an attention economy. The more something mobilizes us emotionally, the greater the chance we stay connected. This does not mean claiming that social media, on their own, cause mental disorders. The relationship is complex and involves factors such as individual vulnerabilities, social context, type of use, consumed content, social comparison, cyberbullying, sleep quality and other elements. But health authorities have warned about the risks associated with excessive or problematic use and continuous exposure to certain content, especially among young people.

Perhaps we are, then, facing a new contradiction: the more conscious we want to be, the greater our difficulty in leaving the state of alert may become. And this is particularly complex for those who already carry a historical memory of survival. Resistance is born from refusal: refusing erasure, violence, inequality and the idea that we must accept the world as it is. Nonconformity was and continues to be a fundamental force for any social transformation. Without it, many rights and achievements simply would not exist.

But to what extent do we resist because we wish to transform the world and to what extent do we keep fighting because we can no longer turn off the alert?

This may be one of the most complex issues of our time. Because there is a difference between resistance and permanent survival. Resistance can be a choice, elaboration, creation and building of the future. Continuous survival, on the other hand, requires reaction. It keeps us prepared for the next attack, the next exclusion, the next threat. And when living in a state of emergency becomes a prolonged experience, rest can seem neglect, tranquility can seem alienation and satisfaction can even produce guilt.

For those who have had to stay alert for a long time, letting their guard down can seem irresponsible. For those who have had to fight to exist, being well can feel like complacency. For those who have built their consciousness through resistance, imagining a life not organized around struggle can even produce a kind of emptiness. Perhaps that is the paradox of hypervigilance: the danger may no longer be present, but the need to look for it remains.

Social media intensify this process because they do more than expose us to the world: they constantly expose us to each other. We do not just follow events, we also watch how people react to them. Who took a stand, who didn’t, who spoke, who misspoke, who seems indifferent, who appears overly politicized, who is producing, who is resting, who seems to be living better. Life becomes simultaneously an experience and a performance, consciousness and vigilance.

Perhaps that is why some people only feel safe when they are solving a crisis. After years of living in unstable contexts, silence can feel strange. Calm can seem too fleeting to be trustworthy. The absence of conflict may not be perceived as peace, but as the pause before something bad happens.

In this sense, hypervigilance is not only individual. It is also historical, political and collective. The pandemic made this experience more visible and more shared, but it did not create it. For many bodies, the emergency did not begin in 2020.

What happened is that a larger portion of society began to experience, albeit in different ways, the instability and sense of threat that certain groups have known for a long time. We survived the pandemic, but perhaps part of us has remained psychologically organized as if the emergency never ended.

And perhaps that is precisely where we need to revisit the idea of resistance. Not to abandon it. Resistance remains necessary. Nonconformity remains necessary. Indignation remains necessary. But we must ask whether we are building forms of resistance that free us or merely honing our ability to stay permanently at war.

Because there is a difference between being aware and being constantly threatened. There is a difference between resistance and exhaustion. And perhaps one of the deepest forms of emancipation is understanding that we do not need to suffer to prove that we remain politically conscious.

Surviving was — and continues to be — revolutionary.

But we cannot turn survival into the ultimate limit of what we can imagine. Perhaps the next radical move is to build a life where we can let our guard down without disappearing, rest without guilt, and experience pleasure without it meaning abandoning the fight.