The Padded Middle

If you’re old enough to have been born in the age of rotary phones and getting up to change the channel, then you’re probably also aware of the disconnect in kids and young adults who don’t understand the struggles of an earlier time.

Kids today don’t have the same context we do. They get annoyed because the Internet is down or the app doesn’t do that. They get annoyed because not everything can be done online and there’s nothing to watch on the 200 channels they have access to.

The technological revolution offered a shift in perspective to new generations and there is no longer context for how we grew up. That’s an important mirror for how necessary experience is in terms of creating context.

Many people think that if we just got rid of all the bad experiences in the world there would be no suffering. It makes sense. If there was no war and no trauma, it stands to reason that people would feel better for a while, but only for those with enough context to know the difference. What about the generations that don’t have the same context?

Human emotion runs on a spectrum that is parallel to human experience. From joy to pain and everything in between, both human experience and emotion offer the same range. What would happen to the spectrum of human emotion if we hacked off part of the spectrum of human experience? Would people just stop feeling those emotions?

The short answer is no. The emotions wouldn’t disappear. They would flatten. Think of it like removing some of the lower keys on the piano. The depth would flatten because you didn’t have access to certain notes. But flat doesn’t mean gone when it comes to emotion, and that’s where it gets interesting.

Technology, education, science, customer service, safety, and many other things have unintentionally padded the mid-level experiences in life. We’ve taken away boredom, annoyance, inconvenience, and other things that made people uncomfortable but weren’t overly painful.

Padding the middle means we are left mostly with extremes in our experience. It’s either perfect or it’s traumatic. “Trauma” is now used to describe experiences that are not truly traumatic, but simply uncomfortable. Discomfort begins to feel traumatic because our ability to deal with discomfort has diminished. The uncomfortable middle has been removed for a large segment of the population.

This is largely a first world problem because we have excess stability. When everybody has a phone and an app, the bank doesn’t need to be open as much and you don’t need to wait in line as often. The grocery store delivers on the same day. Those are first world things. But they also remove the discomfort of having to survive without the thing you suddenly decided you needed.

So then when there is a line, you don’t have the patience and you go home and use Amazon Prime instead. That’s what the padded middle looks like. Patience is learned by living in a world without padding.

This creates a distortion. People who live without some of that padding appear to be struggling more than they should be, when in truth, they are simply experiencing the unpadded middle.

I straddle both worlds. I have the Internet, a computer, access to Amazon Prime and Netflix. I also have months where I struggle to pay the rent and we don’t go grocery shopping except to buy milk. I stock up when I can so we can live lean when we need to. I eat through my pantry not as a fun experiment to post on TikTok, but because life makes that necessary sometimes.

I understand how nice it is to have the padding. I also understand how uncomfortable the unpadded middle is. But it’s not traumatic. It’s just life.

This isn’t to say that technology, access, and convenience are bad. They are first world luxuries. But they make the unpadded middle seem harsh when it isn’t. They train our nervous systems to react more strongly to lesser experience. That’s exactly the shift that would happen if we got rid of some of the extremes of experience as well.

Context is everything. When you’ve never had access to convenience like Amazon Prime and same day delivery, you don’t miss it. The minute you lose it, you understand what you had.

Pain and comfort work in similar ways. Without the experience, you don’t know what you didn’t have, so you don’t miss it.

Eventually the emotions that were attached to more painful experiences latch on to something less severe. The context of the emotion becomes distorted. Suddenly we overreact to standing in line because we’re used to having something dropped at our door in an hour.

Uncomfortable experiences begin to feel traumatic because we never learned how to deal with the discomfort of not having access to convenience.

The painful emotions don’t go away just because the experience they used to exist within doesn’t exist. The emotions attach to something else, and the rest of the spectrum becomes distorted.

The padded middle of first world living has already shifted the emotional spectrum in ways we haven’t really paid attention to yet. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You can watch the distortion happening in real time.

Emotions are tied to experience. Humans need that range of experience to feel the full range of emotion without distortion.

It’s not that we need war and trauma.

We just need a wide enough range of everyday experience that we don’t lose our ability to tolerate the experience we do have.