It seems to me that Alzheimer’s might be a sort of insanity. Or, if not Alzheimer’s, then whatever it is that happens to many people when they get close to death and lose their memory (maybe Alzheimer’s is different).
If I am right, then this phenomenon should be on the increase.
I think there are two explanations for its rise over the past several decades. The most common is that we live longer. Older people lose their memory and we have more older people. The second is that something unhealthy has entered our every day diet that wasn’t there before: aluminum is a popular contender here.
Those causes might be contributing factors, I don’t know. But what I do know is that ceaseless low-grade entertainment must also be bad. Meaningless, rapid, and strung-along entertainment has to be undermining man’s ability to “focus” and therefore to “remember” or even “be” himself.
The inability to focus, a.k.a. cowardice, makes a “man” less of a man.
I think people go in for entertainment as a drunk goes in for the bottle: the pain they are addressing is the same pain. This pain has to do with awareness of mortality. It’s the same pain that causes anger and when it is truly addressed can produce an Achilles. We do not address it. Low-grade entertainment is merely a diversion.
We have concocted new and clever ways of distracting ourselves from this pain, so it stands to reason we might be more inept at facing death than before—our brains might be “weaker.”
I am sure the terror must be fairly great in old age and it might lead a person’s mind to constantly circle around the hard fact of their mortality. This circling could slowly and then rapidly destroy the more basic connections and memories, unstringing the mind before death unstrings the limbs.
I have seen a man who knew he was going to die soon try to be cheerful. He would be “above water” for a couple minutes before collapsing into the most bitter and incomprehensible tirades, then he would “come to” and say “well well” and try to be cheerful again. He was going insane. He was not someone who lost his memory, but I could tell he was losing it at the end. If he had started to fear death sooner and felt this fear longer, I think he would have lost his memory as time went on. I should also add: fear of death accompanied by pain must be more difficult than just fearing death.
I assume the low-grade entertainment (and advertisement) afflicting us today makes us less aware of ourselves and less able to resist the tendency of thoughts to “spiral out of control.”
There are political and medical dimensions to this thought that could be taken up some other time. I conclude by saying I like the idea that courage is needed for focus, that focus is needed for memory, and that memory is needed for there to be an “I.”
I've wondered about the same thing. Lately I've been wondering if aphantasia is just the atrophy of the mind's eye due to constant bombardment from externally fed media. To your point, if this escape to media is something we choose, then it's worse than physical suicide, it's a deliberate diminishment of the will itself into nothingness.