Hyperactive vigilance reduces social life to mere survival

Evidence

An animal busy with eating must also attend to other tasks. For example, it must hold rivals away from its prey. It must constantly be on the lookout, lest it be eaten while eating. At the same time, it must guard its young and keep an eye on its sexual partner. In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion—either they are eating or they are copulating. The animal cannot immerse itself contemplatively in what it is facing [Gegenüber] because it must also process background events. Not just multitasking but also activities such as video games produce a broad but flat mode of attention, which is similar to the vigilance of a wild animal. Recent social developments and the structural change of wakefulness are bringing human society deeper and deeper into the wilderness. For example, bullying has achieved pandemic dimensions. Concern for the good life, which also includes life as a member of the community, is yielding more and more to the simple concern for survival. — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 37

Categorization

• QUESTION: The causal jump from fragmented attention to pandemic bullying is asserted, not argued. Worth chasing: does Han offer a mechanism anywhere, or is this a rhetorical leap?
• XREF: connects to: Permanent alertness exhausts itself by killing sustained attention — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 127