Do You Ever Lose the Sensation of Life?

2026-09-25 · 3 min read · meta, consciousness

Someone standing in a dark kitchen at 2:14 AM, just staring into the open fridge. The only light on in the house.

Do you ever lose the sensation of life?

I go through it every single day and I don’t even know if I’m really living it. So I wonder if I’m even conscious at all. Or if somebody’s just on an iPad somewhere, tapping the screen, and I’m moving around.

Do you know if you’re conscious right now? Or is it only because I just mentioned it, and now you’re thinking about it, that you are?

I think the tough part is I don’t really snap back. For most of the day I’d say I’m like, not conscious. I’m just working, or I’m doing this, or I’m focused on that, or going to the gym, or whatever’s next. Etc., etc.

Somebody on an iPad in the dark, tapping the screen. A tiny guy in a hoodie walks to work, then the gym, then home, and the clock jumps with every tap.

Last week I was talking about sleep, and how in deep sleep there’s just no you in there. I think that might be most of my day too. Just with my eyes open.

You ever drive home and you don’t remember the drive? Like at all? Something drove the car. It stopped at the red lights. It used the blinker. And you weren’t there for any of it. There’s even a name for that, highway hypnosis. They’ve been calling it that since the 60s.

That’s the iPad thing. Somebody tapped the screen and the car got home.

Driving home at night, the lane lines streaming past in the headlights. Nobody remembers this drive.

And it’s not just me. Two researchers at Harvard made an iPhone app that pinged people at random times and asked what they were doing, and if they were thinking about something else. Almost half the time, like 47%, people were thinking about something other than what they were doing. So basically half your life you’re somewhere else. And people were less happy when their minds wandered. Even when it wandered somewhere nice, they weren’t any happier than when they were just there.

One day, pinged at 100 random moments. About 47 of them, your head is somewhere else.

But here’s the part that messes with me. Every time you check, you’re there. Obviously. Because checking is being there. So how would you ever know what it’s like when you’re not checking?

Were you feeling your feet in your shoes a second ago? You are now.

A philosopher named Eric Schwitzgebel actually tried to test this. He gave people beepers, and every time it went off they had to say if they’d been feeling their left foot right before the beep. About half the time they said yes. And his conclusion was basically, we still can’t really tell. Because the checking might be what’s doing it.

It’s like the fridge light. Every time you open the door, the light’s on. So you’d think it’s always on. But you only ever see it with the door open. Philosophers actually call this the refrigerator light illusion. I didn’t make that up.

And a guy named Julian Jaynes said something like it back in 1976. It’s like a flashlight in a dark room trying to find something that isn’t lit. Everywhere it points, there’s light. So the flashlight figures the whole room is lit.

A flashlight sweeping a pitch dark room. Wherever it points, the room is there.

Maybe that’s my problem, I guess. I never open the door.

So when do I feel the most alive? I don’t know. I’d say I don’t feel alive often. If at all.

What is being alive even supposed to feel like? Is there something? Or do you just kind of just live?

I don’t know.

How this was written

AI helped draft sections of this post, usually code walkthroughs or background material I asked it to summarize. The structure, claims, and judgment are mine. I edited every paragraph.

Licensed CC-BY-4.0.