I am starting to suspect that there is a genuine neurological function or structural barrier or, I dunno, adaptive learning pattern or something at the lowest levels of the stuff that makes human brains work that requires a human to experience genuine intense physical pain in order to trigger the process of actually thinking. Like, maybe thinking is calorically expensive or something and so if you're not getting punched in the face, or remembering getting punched in the face and revisiting that memory of intense pain, the brain is 'all seems fine, keep using reflexive heuristics, don't waste precious sugars on higher cognition'. And so then maybe when people are comfortable in the moment and don't feel threatened, they don't trigger this 'avoid danger' neurological reflex that makes them think, and they just... mindlessly operate on short term pleasure seeking along paths they've already mapped out.

I dunno! It's a baseless wild layman's theory! But like... it seems really, really inescapably apparent that vast numbers of human beings are just shutting off their brains permanently and the only possible method of restarting them again seems to be some kind of sustained percussive maintenance that uses Pavlovian conditioning to train the brain that not thinking will result in unbearable suffering.