Blasé attitude results from nerves exhausted by rapid contradictory stimuli

Evidence

Just as an immoderately sensuous life makes one blasé because it stimulates the nerves to their utmost reactivity until they finally can no longer produce any reaction at all, so, less harmful stimuli, through the rapidity and the contradictoriness of their shifts, force the nerves to make such violent responses, tear them about so brutally that they exhaust their last reserves of strength and, remaining in the same milieu, do not have time for new reserves to form. This incapacity to react to new stimulations with the required amount of energy constitutes in fact that blasé attitude which every child of a large city evinces when compared with the products of the more peaceful and more stable milieu. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 752

Categorization

• XREF: Physiological causal mechanism for the blasé attitude—the essay needs this exact mechanism to argue Julius’s detachment is a neural defense, not a moral choice. — connects to: Rapid fashion change signals nervous exhaustion in an era — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 722; Rational exchange presupposes detachment that impulsive minds cannot achieve — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 253; Julius’s flâneur wandering embodies Simmel’s blasé attitude, weaponizing civil inattention into unreliable witnessing (+1 more)

Related

• The blasé outlook is uniquely a metropolitan psychic phenomenon (similarity 0.85)
• Rapid fashion change signals nervous exhaustion in an era (similarity 0.78)