What happens when feeling becomes too costly?Numbness is a short work of literary nonfiction about the quiet ways people learn to dull sensation. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes without noticing at all. Through personal reflection and cultural observation, it explores numbness as a strategy: how it protects us, how it helps us cope, and how it slowly becomes habitual.This essay asks why it exists at all. Are humans meant to be fully present all the time? Or is so...