The digital vegan idea is interesting and I hadn't heard of it -- thank you. I think physiological metaphors have much to offer in thinking about online life. A sort of 'emotional hysteresis' akin to insulin resistance is another one I reach for frequently; and, like with IR, fasting seems to be a surprisingly effective intervention for the digital version of the pathology, though of course you have to apply it repeatedly to counter the 'dietary' excess.

> Is modern life flattened with respect to emotion? Incendiary Twitter traffic and torrents of "hate speech" everywhere would imply otherwise.

Maybe an example will be helpful to make this less abstract.

Most Westerners are far safer, physically, than they have ever before. They are less likely to starve to death, get eaten by a bear, be murdered, die of exposure or of an infected hang-nail. And yet, I suspect that even in the midst of this relative luxury and safety, we are just as miserable as when danger from all causes was drastically increased.

Put more mathematically, I suspect that people react emotionally to a problem of magnitude 4 as people 200 years ago reacted to a problem of magnitude 9, because progress has skewed the distribution of modern hazards so radically that the far ends of the scale are almost never experienced. So in a world of small problems, the largest small problems feels large because the brain is bad at absolutes.