Emotion Inflation

noise, Noise, NOISE! I picture The Grinch in my head as I write that. But I think I feel like him any time my phone dings, or I search YouTube, or I do just about anything, anywhere. My life now seems to be narrated by reels, push notifications, and clickbait. And the headlines, emails, and social media posts have only become more emotional. Something shifted several years ago requiring content to be that much more flashy to get our attention. It's like some sort of emotional inflation factor. It has accelerated to a point that is seizure inducing. I went to see The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act this past weekend with my kids. I've never done acid. But after that, I get the idea. How can written fiction compete with something like that? How do we cut through the noise?

Over the weekend I went to the Wilson County Library Book Festival in Floresville. It was a great hang with other authors and I got to connect with a few new readers. While talking shop with the great fiction writer Jim Roberts, we both observed how literary fiction has a hard time standing out from everything else. This particular event had a lot of spiritual/religious authors. But having been to several book functions recently, fantasy seems to be the winner. Escape helps cut through the fog of overwhlem. Your nervous system has a chance to ground in a fictional place where there are no phones. Or if there are, they only serve to advance a plot rather than detract from our purpose. Contemporary literary fiction, with its tendency to stare down the uncomfortable moment we are in and name what makes it uncomfortable, seems to have a difficult time getting a footing.

I mean, I get it. It's not like I'm constantly in the literary trenches digging through each deep thought and soul-crushing feeling. I cycle through some fantasy myself (and let's not forget there is some amazing literary fantasy). Escape is one of the most important aspects of reading(I am looking to my own experience for reference for this). But I wonder if sometimes that is just a symptom of the noise. We're moving so fast, with so much overwhelm, that we need something quick to just kind of take the edge off. Combine AI into that equation, and I worry we will move into an era of quickly generated stories that have nothing left of our humanity in them and serve only to distract from, rather than connect to, the current moment.

Melodramatic? Catastrophizing? Probably. So what should I point to counteract those sentiments?

Records. We worked so hard to get away from the static and pop of vinyl. Now they are coming back. A recently listened-to podcast said it is because people like to "own" their music instead of it living in a cloud. That feels true. But I own several records, and when I play them, it's about more than owning them. It's about the ritual of flipping through them to find the right vibe. It's the tactile expierence of placing it on the player and moving the needle. It's the thump in the speakers when it is reach the innermost terminus. It forces me to slow down, to fully appreciate the music and the feeling it finds in me. It's a lot like the increase of independent bookstores in the US. Readers are selecting their books in person more often rather than online. Which means they have to slow down.

This is where I believe literary fiction could return to prominence. If you like the crackle of a record, if you are buying your books from a physical store (especially if it's an indie), then I hope you have read a book that's considered literary fiction recently. Savor those sentences like you would the groove of your latest album purchase. Take time with those feelings like you do as you walk through shelves at your favorite bookstore. That's the way we fight back against the noise: quietly, slowly, deliberately, savoring each word and moment. Read anything you want. But don't forget to reconnect to the moment you're in, to take it in, with with a little help from the precision of your favorite literary author.