You're in a lecture. A notification appears. You check your phone – just for a second – and when you look up again the lecturer is closing, chairs are scraping, people are already leaving. You realise you've missed it. Not just the content, but the sense of having been there at all. You feel oddly displaced. Not fully in the lecture. Not fully in the phone either. Somewhere in between, somewhere flatter. It's a difficult feeling to name. But it isn't new. A philosopher called Thomas Nagel described the structure underneath it decades ago, before any of this existed. He called it the absurd.

A more familiar version comes from Albert Camus. In The Myth of Sisyphus, the absurd emerges from a mismatch: we want meaning, and the world doesn't supply it. His image is well known – Sisyphus condemned to push a boulder uphill forever. But Camus insists on defiance. Sisyphus understands the futility and continues anyway. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." It's a compelling image, even an attractive one. But it has curdled into something else online. The boulder becomes aesthetic. What once read as philosophical defiance starts to look like stylised resignation. Nagel's version is less romantic, and more exact.

For Nagel, the absurd doesn't arise from the universe's silence or the inevitability of death. It comes from a tension within consciousness itself. We live our lives from the inside – we care about our work, our relationships, our plans. We take them seriously. But we also have the capacity to step back and view all of this from the outside – to see our seriousness as contingent, arbitrary, one way of living among many. Both perspectives are real. Neither can be switched off. The absurd is the collision between them. Not a confrontation with the universe, but a confrontation within ourselves. Nagel's response is neither revolt nor despair, but irony – a recognition that the very capacity producing this tension is also one of our most distinctive features. You notice it, and you continue.

Nagel's original essay assumes this "stepping back" is rare. Most of the time, we are absorbed in our lives. The external view appears only intermittently – in moments of reflection, disruption, or distance – before receding again. That cadence makes irony possible. You step outside your life briefly, see its contingency, and return to it intact. The collision is occasional. It illuminates without overwhelming. But that is no longer true.

The feed doesn't just intensify Nagel's collision – it changes its structure entirely. Stepping back is no longer something you do. It's something done to you, continuously, by the form of the feed itself. It begins with juxtaposition. Within seconds you move from a war to a wedding to a meme to someone's grief. These are not experiences you can enter into from within; the format denies you that time. The only way to process them is from above, from a distance – the external view imposed as default, not achieved through reflection. But the shift runs deeper. It's not just other lives that are flattened into this stream. Your life appears there too – your ambitions, your relationships – rendered in the same format, subject to the same logic. What Nagel thought required philosophical effort – seeing your own life as contingent, one among many – is now automated. You don't step outside your life to see it that way. It's shown to you like that, over and over again. And even if it stopped there, the speed would be enough. The movement between these perspectives is no longer occasional but constant, interrupting you mid-thought, mid-conversation, mid-life. The engaged view never has time to reassert itself before the detached view cuts back in. Neither perspective settles. The collision doesn't arrive as a moment anymore – it hums in the background, uninterrupted. And in doing so, it stops illuminating anything at all. It doesn't produce irony. It produces static.

What this produces isn't despair or even traditional nihilism. It's something flatter. A low-grade exhaustion: things you know you care about don't fully register, nothing quite lands at full intensity. You move through work, conversations, relationships with a sense of partial presence – not absent, but not fully there either. The world doesn't disappear; it dulls. This isn't a personal failure. It's structural. As Byung-Chul Han argues in The Burnout Society, we no longer live in a society of limits and prohibitions, but of limitless possibility – where everything is available, everything is permitted. The demand doesn't come from outside; it's internalised. You scroll freely, choose freely, engage freely – and when it leaves you depleted, there's no one to blame. The feed intensifies this condition. Nothing is excluded, nothing is framed, nothing is given priority. A war, a joke, a friend's milestone, your own ambitions – all arrive in the same format, at the same speed, with the same claim on your attention. The result isn't that things stop mattering, but that they stop mattering differently. The distinctions that give experience depth begin to erode. And without that depth, Nagel's irony loses its footing. Irony requires a stable position to return to – a life you can re-enter after stepping back. But when both views are constantly destabilised, there's nowhere solid to stand. The absurd is no longer something you can acknowledge with a wry distance. It becomes something you can't quite locate at all.

Nagel's response no longer holds under these conditions. Not because his diagnosis was wrong – the structure of the absurd remains exactly as he described it – but because his solution depended on a form of consciousness that is no longer stable. Irony requires distance you can step into and step out of. It presupposes that the engaged view can be fully inhabited, left briefly, and then returned to intact. That structure has broken down. And Camus's alternative fares no better. His defiance required something to push against – a silent, indifferent world. There is no such adversary here. The system functions smoothly, and we participate in it willingly. There is nothing to revolt against because the pressure is continuous and self-administered. But what has been lost is more basic than any response. The capacity to fully occupy either side of the collision has eroded. You cannot settle into your life long enough for it to feel fully serious, and you cannot detach from it long enough for that detachment to clarify anything. You remain suspended between the two – not moving between perspectives, but held inside their interference. This is not an intensification of the absurd. It is a transformation of the conditions that made it intelligible. Nothing before this reorganised the structure of attention in quite this way – not by adding content, but by automating the movement Nagel took to be rare. The philosophical responses to the absurd assumed a mind that could step back and return. That mind is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

The lecture ends. Chairs scrape, bags zip, people stand. You close your laptop, still slightly unsure where you've been. Not fully in the room. Not fully elsewhere either. That in-between feeling lingers, harder to shake now that it has a shape. Nagel thought the ability to step outside your life, to see it clearly, was one of our more remarkable capacities. He was right. But that capacity no longer arrives as a rare moment of clarity. It runs constantly, quietly, underneath everything. Not something you do. Something that happens. And it doesn't feel like perspective. It feels like distance.