Grey

We've all felt it to some degree. Some accept the comfortable grey embrace, others will fight like a dog for their liberty. It starts when you fall into a routine which minimally takes care of your human needs.

You go to work, then come home and do nothing of significance. The relaxation tonight you think will prepare you for the next days labor. On the weekends, you sleep, eat, and mindlessly consume some kind of simple distraction — weekends are for chilling right? You stop making new friends, and hang out with the old ones less; when you do, the context is always the same.

Then the grey starts creeping in around the edges of your consciousness.

Have you ever stared at a single point on the wall for more than a minute without blinking or moving your eyes? Without any change in the visual field for some time, your brain begins the process of sensory habituation. It starts to tune out input that is no longer useful for navigating the world. After a while of staring at that point, you will lose conscious experience of your visual field — it all goes grey. However, as soon as you move your eyes a little bit or something changes in your line of sight, the experience of vision comes back full force.

The brain simply tries to save calories by pruning out the activity which serves no use. And this applies to more than just the sense of vision. I believe that after doing the same actions day in and day out by habit with no significant change in stimuli, you will have a general lessened need to rely on your senses, thus those senses and the processing of them will become dimmed.

Imagine from your energy-stingy brain's perspective: the food reliably arrives at 12:00pm sharp, so what need is there to keep alive your instincts for the hunt? Tonight, you will be a google search away from naked bodies of beautiful people, so why should your pragmatic brain waste energy on calling attention to the attractive people around you? You can probably perform your morning routine with your eyes closed, so what need is there to fully process the visual input of yourself in the mirror brushing teeth? When you do enough of life on autopilot, eventually sentience is lost altogether.

But there may yet be a way out.
You must journey out into the harsh world with courage. Refuse the scripted routines and societal anesthesia which make life easy, useless, and boring. Instead, embrace your discomfort and set your mind ablaze with the vibrant flame of consciousness.