There was a time when seeing the Earth from space was an event capable of stopping the world. Today, that image may appear on our mobile phone between a funny video and an advert. We look, swipe a finger and move on. We have never had so much access to the extraordinary. And perhaps we have never been so little impressed by it.
In a few minutes we can watch a world record, discover a remote beach, see images captured on Mars, meet a child prodigy, follow a war live or step virtually into a city thousands of kilometres away. Each of these experiences would have fascinated earlier generations. For us, they are part of a flow that seems to have no end.
The problem is not what we see. It is the speed at which we stop seeing it.
The inflation of wonder
Digital platforms compete for one of the most valuable assets of our time: attention. To win it, they offer us a permanent succession of stimuli. Everything has to be more beautiful, more dramatic, more surprising or more thrilling than what appeared seconds before.
We have thus created a kind of inflation of wonder. The more extraordinary we consume, the harder it becomes to surprise us.
Even the technology we use every day reveals this contradiction. We can speak instantly to someone on the other side of the planet, carry thousands of books on a small device, consult maps of practically any city, translate languages in seconds or ask an artificial intelligence to create an image from a few words.
These are extraordinary capabilities. They have become so common that we only notice them when they stop working.
When tragedy also passes quickly
This trivialisation has a more disturbing side. The same screen that shows us beauty also presents us with suffering. A war. An earthquake. A family that has lost everything. Then, a recipe. A joke. A holiday photograph.
The sequence is disconcerting, but it has become habitual. It does not necessarily mean that we are less human or less sensitive. It means that we are exposed to a quantity of emotional information that no previous generation has faced in this way.
To be able to carry on, we get used to it. And there a silent danger arises: we begin to confuse what we see frequently with what is normal.
Ordinary lives in the face of an extraordinary world
There is another consequence. We no longer compare our lives only with those of relatives, friends or colleagues. We compare them with a shop window in which some of the best moments of millions of people are gathered.
We see idyllic trips, meteoric careers, perfect homes, flawless bodies, young millionaires, happy families and exceptional talents. Our everyday life enters into competition with the best moments on the planet. Naturally, it loses.
A perfectly good life can begin to seem insufficient when it is constantly confronted with lives that have been selected, edited and presented precisely to arouse desire and admiration.
Recovering the capacity to admire
Perhaps the extraordinary is not disappearing. Perhaps it is we who are passing through it too quickly. Admiration needs time. It is hard to truly marvel at something when we know that, at the flick of a finger, another experience awaits.
We do not need to abandon technology or romanticise a past in which we knew less about the world. We only need to recover something we are slowly handing over to screens: our attention.
Because the extraordinary is still everywhere. It is in a scientific discovery, in a work of art, in a child learning to speak, in an athlete who has trained for years to overcome a limit, in a person who starts again after losing everything.
The world has not become less fascinating. It is we who have grown accustomed to fascination too quickly.
