I wish I could recall the name of this short story I read in my literature class more than 20 years ago. I don’t remember much except that it was about a man in a mental asylum and his life before he ended up there. The recollections were about an identification card that showed him as a number/code in a society where each person was known by his or her respective number/code. There were cards for all purposes and needs. And then he had some sort of a gadget that connected him with his family and friends, all the time.

These were reasons enough to make the protagonist lose his mind. At least this seemed the message of the story that fell in the realm of science-fiction.

It took less time for the fiction to become reality than the author may have thought. In a matter of decades, the entire humanity confined to the cities seems to be living the life of the protagonist; outside a formal mental asylum.

Trying to locate the sources of anxiety and the ensuing fatigue that are a part and parcel of modern urban living inevitably takes us to what we mostly do during the course of our day and also night. This must have something to do with our desire to stay virtually connected with many people and our penchant to get newsfeed from everywhere we can. Thus we are tracing the sources of stress in technology, essentially.

It may well be that technology, at least initially, came to ease the stresses of life, and later instead of mitigating the pain magnified it. It did provide answers to mankind’s longing to connect with other people, considering that demands of a changing lifestyle were taking them apart and afar. Alongside, it created this desire to know more about what is happening close to home and in other parts of the world.

Today, it is not uncommon to spot most of us reverting to our gadgets every few minutes to check on the news and having an uninterrupted nightly ritual of checking on other people’s lives on the respective social media we subscribe to.

It may not be so easy to dismiss this as a stress-inducing activity since people seem to be gainfully occupied while they are at it. And yet it is thought that it is making us more stressed, fatigued and depressed than before. Articles are written on how the new virtual communication is no substitute for real life interaction, how it is making people less social and sad too. Artists are trying to capture the consequences of people glued to their palms instead of each other.

And yet people continue to stay engaged in their virtual world, which actress Emma Thompson thinks is killing a generation. Referring particularly to social media, she says a whole generation will eventually "chuck themselves off a cliff like lemmings". Her concern is that we haven’t thought hard about what staying connected would do to us.

There indeed is a flip side to it and we have not perhaps learnt to find the perfect balance.

Those who are critical of social media or internet addiction among people of all ages count conversation as one of the casualties. The list of negative effects is endless. Relationships are said to be strained while one partner is engaged in serious intellectual argument with a stranger and children are leading unstructured lives. People have stopped living in the moment or enjoying it, preferring to share their life details on social media instead. We are losing hobbies simply because this is the new hobby.

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What about this other preoccupation of our lives -- to compete with others in becoming more well-informed? This connectivity is closely linked with the bombardment of news from around the world all the time. There is a strange sense of worth attached to knowing what is happening in the world, and technology is addressing this new need in ways unknown before.

For instance, now you can adjust your Twitter feed in a way that you get news 24/7 without having to subscribe to a paper. But most of this news is about disasters that have taken place or are waiting to happen or some sort of scandal. All of these are picked up to make us angry or scared or nervous. Yes, that is cause for stress indeed, but what is happening is that one form of media is competing against the other to make the consumers of their news more anxious.

But this is not the only thing the over-exposure to distressing news is doing. On another level, it is desensitising us, making us indifferent. We crave for more gruesomeness, new levels of barbarity or tragedy every time we switch to a media source. The kind of terrorism this country alone has witnessed in the last decade or so has, ironically and unfortunately, numbed the society and made violence seem so commonplace.

While we think we are so closely connected in our virtual community lives (from where we can launch a revolution), there is a lot of individual anguish. Perhaps we are more disconnected than before. No wonder the sense of fatigue is drawing most of us into its fold.