Filter Fatigue
A concept from the Reality Drift project describing the mental toll of constantly sorting digital content, people, and meaning.
**Filter Fatigue** – describes the quiet exhaustion of modern attention. Not because you’re doing too much—but because you’re constantly deciding what not to do.
In today’s digital environment, we’re asked to filter everything—notifications, content, people, emotion, even our own responses. Every scroll is a subtle act of discernment. Every inbox is a minefield of urgency theater. Even leisure now demands curation.
This is the weight of Filter Fatigue: when the act of filtering becomes cognitive labor, not a relief. It leads to indecision, emotional flatness, and burnout masked as apathy.
Coined by the Reality Drift project, Filter Fatigue helps explain the ambient friction of life online—and the spiritual drain of staying conscious in a performative world.
Read the full analysis:
- Filter Fatigue: The Hidden Cost of Curated Everything (Substack)
- Filter Fatigue and the Culture of Overload: A Framework for Modern Life (Medium)
- -Full documentation (Internet Archive)
- -Research notes (GitHub)
- X thread introducing Filter Fatigue
🔗 Related terms: Synthetic Realness, Optimization Trap, Performativity Spiral, Engineered Authenticity, The Great Flattening, Commodification Creep, Inconvenience Inflation, Reality Drift
Note: Offbrandguy did not create the Reality Drift concepts. This site serves as a curated archive to document and share these ideas for those exploring cultural change, emerging language, and the strange ways modern life is shifting.