Don't fall asleep

How digital distractions are like carbon monoxide

Photo by Mikael Seegen on Unsplash

You’ve heard about the boiling frog metaphor. In a short essay from last year, I wrote about how it isn’t real — a frog in slowly heating water will jump out long before it boils to death. This is great news if you’re a frog in a pot of water, but bad news if you’re a human misapprehending the prevailing threats of our culture.

Here’s what’s been worrying me.

Right around the turn of this year (late 2024, early 2025) The Telepathy Tapes came out as an absolutely smash viral hit of a podcast. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone. The show beat Joe Rogan for a few weeks. Joe Rogan. Nobody does that. To everyone who listened to it, the virality made sense. Here was a deeply compelling, basically undeniable case for the reality of telepathy, which cuts directly against the prevailing Western materialist worldviews of the past several hundred years. It was a Big Deal.

But now no one is talking about it.

Also, remember how, two years ago, David Grusch, a high-ranking intelligence officer, came out as a whistleblower making claims about UFOs and non-human intelligences that, at the very least, proved there is a democracy-breaking conspiracy going on that delegitimizes Congress itself — either to hide alien technology and “biologics” (sometimes by murdering people), or to spin a story that is so shocking people literally can’t believe it.

But now no one is talking about it.

The very foundations that underpin all modern assumptions about who and what we are as human beings have been cracked so deeply that they are crumbling away under our feet.

But nobody cares.

Why?

Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash

By now, I think almost everyone knows that we’re being lulled into a kind of permanent dopaminergic stupor by glowing squares, portals to infinite infotainment and every flavor of pornography.

But nobody cares.

I’ve never driven drunk, but I’ve driven tired, which is basically the same thing. What makes driving drunk or tired so dangerous is not just that your reaction time is slowed, or that your judgement is impaired, it’s that you don’t care.

Have you ever been behind the wheel on a long, straight freeway, eyes fluttering closed, body tortured with the desire to abdicate consciousness, and had this thought: “It’s probably fine if I close my eyes for just a second.”

You are inside a four thousand pound cube of metal going seventy miles an hour down a road made of asphalt. It is absolutely not fine if you close your eyes for just a second.

And yet, when you’re that tired, that hypnotized by the bright perforation of the lane markers, it sure does seem like it’s probably fine.

But I think our situation is worse than driving tired or drunk. After all, if you’ve got any shred of sense, you can just pull over and go to sleep, or hand the keys to someone else.

I think our current crisis is more like living in a house with a carbon monoxide leak.

Do you know what makes carbon monoxide so lethal? When you breathe, blood in your lungs pulls oxygen out of the air, and dumps carbon dioxide back into it. To facilitate that little magic trick, there are receptors on every red blood cell that oxygen likes to stick to. And it sticks just the right amount, so that the little O2 molecules can pop right off to be used by other cells in your body, who give away some carbon dioxide in exchange. Then the red blood cells carry that CO2 back to the lungs, and take on some fresh O2.

(Biology is lit.)

Carbon monoxide (not to be confused with carbon dioxide) also likes to stick to those receptors on red blood cells. Except CO sticks to them about two hundred times stronger than oxygen does. Which means all the seats on the red blood cell that were reserved for O2 get taken by CO instead. And it takes a long time, a long time, for the CO to clear out of the blood — 12 to 24 hours.

So what actually happens when you breathe air that has carbon monoxide in it?

Well, the CO will immediately start taking O2’s seats on your red blood cells. The more this happens, the less oxygen you get, which is how suffocation works.

But it’s worse than that.

You might not have known this (I didn’t until sort of recently), but when you hold your breath for too long, the thing that makes you want to gasp — that panicky feeling of being starved for air — is actually caused by a buildup of CO2 in the lungs. All it takes to make that feeling go away is to breathe out all the CO2, which happens after a few deep breaths in and out.

So what happens if you start to suffocate because there’s a bunch of CO (carbon monoxide) crowding out the oxygen? The CO2 (carbon dioxide) has no idea what’s going on. Nothing’s taking its seats on the red blood cells, so it keeps clearing out just like always as you breathe in and out. Which means you never feel that panicky feeling of being starved for air. You never feel like you’re suffocating.

Instead, you just get really sleepy. Like, really sleepy. Like, it’s probably fine if I close my eyes for just a second.

Meanwhile, your whole body is getting absolutely wrecked by a lack of oxygen, and all your organs start shutting down, including your brain. If you fall asleep behind the wheel and wreck your car, you might survive. If you fall asleep in the presence of carbon monoxide, nothing can save you.

But you’ll be too sleepy to care.

This is why there’s a law that every house needs a CO alarm. If you’re feeling sleepy, and that alarm goes off, then you need to get out as fast as you can.

Probably the metaphor is obvious by now, but I’ll belabor it a bit anyway.

We are, all of us, surrounded by an unending stream of tasty diversions. In place of the spiritual oxygen we need to survive, we are addicted to the distractions that are putting us to sleep. Deep down, we know it’s poison. We may have even seen the warnings about the mass psychoses that threaten to dissolve our society from the inside out.

But the alarm bells get awfully quiet if you just keep scrolling.

So we can’t save each other by generating more headlines for the feeds. We can’t shout our way out of the poisonous cloud that is numbing us all to death. More and more, I’m convinced that we have to run outside, breathe deep the fresh air, lungful after lungful, and then ask who else is trapped inside.

Because if someone is succumbing to these toxic gases, you can’t just raise the alarm, you have to drag them out of the house.

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Hang on

This post was a bummer to write, and I’m sure it was a bummer to read. Hopefully I can make up for that with the follow up next week, where I’ll try to outline some ways to go breathe fresh air, and some ways to help drag the people you love away from the toxic gases that are killing them.

I’ve got some ideas about all that, but I’m hoping you have more. Because we’re all in this poisoned house together.