Feel Nothing, Hear Nothing, See Nothing

I don’t know where this story should begin.

Perhaps that uncertainty is the only honest place to start.

For years, I have lived with anxiety. At its worst, it escalated into panic attacks that sent me to the emergency room multiple times. When it hit, my mind acted as a fast-moving, derailed train, shaking violently and producing relentless pushes. Every single breath felt like a task rather than a natural process. I struggled to tolerate the time it took for my wife to finish a single sentence. Even watching my computer start up was enough to trigger agitation. The world turned unbearable.

Medication overrode my state with unsettling ease. One pill could move me from extreme anxiety into a calm that felt unfamiliar.

What unsettled me was not the relief, but how easily a chemical intervention could rewrite my emotional reality. I studied science and engineering when I was younger, enough to have a basic understanding of how the nervous system carries electrical signals. My doctor later explained how medication intervenes in that system, altering how signals are sent and received. That explanation was more important to me than the diagnosis. It raised a question.

If anxiety can be switched off chemically, what does that say about happiness?

If a few milligrams of one substance can take me from panic to calm, some other chemicals can take someone from calm to happiness. People often argue that such happiness is not real, because nothing external has changed, no achievement, no progress, no stimulation. But when happiness arrives naturally, does it work any differently? Isn’t it also the result of chemical and electrical activity inside the body? For the brain, or perhaps more precisely, for consciousness, is there any meaningful distinction?

I feel nothing different.

The chemical isn’t the only thing that can fool my nervous system. The sound does too. Background sound has become necessary to maintain my fragile inner balance against anxious overthinking as I try to sleep. I play rain, wind, fireplaces. Some are recorded. Some are generated. Real, or not, my body does not care.

This is difficult for me to accept, because in most other parts of my life I care deeply about what is real. I have always preferred the analog over the digital, the physical over the virtual, the original over the reproduction. Yet when my nervous system needs distraction, it responds equally well to artificial soundscapes. A sound, after all, is only a wave, a frequency. Whether it comes from a real fireplace, a recording, or an AI-generated loop, is the waveform reaching my brain scientifically distinguishable?

No. I hear nothing different.

When I look at a photograph, I feel something before I think anything. A calm, a pull, sometimes desire, sometimes distance. It arrives in the body first, as a shift in breath or attention, long before it becomes language.

But the more I think about how my nervous system works, the harder it is for me to trust it. With that in mind, it becomes difficult not to ask the same question when it comes to images. What exactly am I responding to when I look at a photograph? Is there a specific pattern that triggers a familiar internal response?

Light, contrast, shape, color, balance, tension. These are not ideas. They are signals. Together, they reach the body and trigger chemical and electrical activity, just as a pill or a soundwave does. If the pattern of these signals can be understood and rearranged, it becomes possible that the feeling they produce does not depend on the reality behind them. And it is possible that the same feeling could be triggered by a purely engineered image, if it follows the same pattern.

This thought unsettles me more than I want to admit. I would probably see nothing different.

After all, nothing else changes.

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