Being decentered, a loss of balance, or difficulties with orientation are often products of everyday overload. A phenomenon of general discomfort and irritations of frenzied processes of civilization and mechanisms of insecurity? Side-effects of constantly increasing demands and competing claims? A sum of codes that can no longer be identified, overwhelming individuals and overtaxing their intake capacity? The daily compulsion to be "up-to-date", evaluating all information correctly and especially before anyone else, being cleverer, quicker, more communicative than others in order to be able to keep up, endlessly intensifying performance demands. Result: stress, strain, insecurity, mental and physical illnesses, isolation, escape into illusions, etc. Reaction: withdrawal and loneliness, resignation, denial, fear, aggression, violence, depression, neuroses, etc. Added socio-political demands made on individuals cannot be separated from neo-liberal economic rules and dogmas and the tendential end of social market economy and forms of society.
How do symptoms of everyday overload express, declare themselves? Weak points that are affected first, provide a disposition for attack, barometers of mental states that are initially successfully ignored, become increasingly stronger, shift ... from a symptom of being "beside oneself", relating the external sign to internal imbalances? Signals of what is repressed? Signs of what is unresolved, of lack, of unfulfilled desire?
Other perceptions, reactions and behaviors, other contents and forms as measures of protection or to demand attention? Symptoms of insufficient attention to make otherness felt as weakness visible?
Construed self-demands and the self-overload associated with them are often an expression of the discrepancy of the difference between the imaginary and reality. Symptoms of overload are thus symptoms of the real. The extent or the handling of the sum of everyday overload, whether of a private or public nature/culture, is constituted from the respective sociological conditionings, behavioral structures and experiences, which are sedimented in the subjective system as stored codes. Self-produced overload, which is often the product of various processes of socialization, collides with postmodern, performance-oriented and mass-oriented mainstream overload mechanisms.
Acceleration factor rising. Repression factor rising. Entertainment fun trip or ecstasy trip?
Information overload, a mix of disinformation, information, false information and the unsaid multiplies insecurity dispositions. Media-produced images of overload reflect intensified conditions of social and economic competitiveness and generate, at the same time, fears and states of overload. Overload cliches are produced and their everyday symptoms telegenically paraded on talk shows, publicly staged as reality. Hopelessness redundant, including illusionary redemption offered viamedia reports?
How can I get rid of overload, when am I overloaded? When the situation is new, when I have no relevant experience, when I am afraid or have had bad experiences, or when self-images of not being able to cope have become fixed? Expectations generated by others or by myself compete with one another. Ideal images spread out and the feeling of not being good enough is already there. Sweat breaks out. Cancel everything or don't give anything away. You have to be tough, anyone who sweats is under suspicion, back to therapy or the next self-help course.