WHEN THE WORLD MUST ARRIVE PRE-ADJUSTED

Oct. 2026

The headphones erase the neighbor, the feed selects the enemy, the application counts sleep while the deadline dismantles it. Everything protects us. Everything arrives with settings. Meanwhile the body, this badly managed province, continues to sweat, age, hesitate and desire at the wrong hour.

Biological alienation begins when the manufactured environment overrides the organism’s capacity to establish its own rhythms. One adapts—splendidly. One answers faster, measures better, sleeps more efficiently, converts boredom into content and anxiety into a purchase. This subject functions while becoming less capable of functioning anywhere else. Then repair opens its clinics and shops: concentration products for fragmented attention, wellness for organized exhaustion, therapy for workplaces that will not stop producing patients. The wound and the dressing leave the same factory.

Heteropathy names the psychological circuit that develops inside this factory. Filtered environments reduce contact with unselected difference; immediate relief rewards withdrawal; reduced exposure makes raw life harder to metabolize; the resulting distress demands another filter. Research establishes some components of this circuit, not the whole hypothesis: sensory reactivity, intolerance of uncertainty and anxiety are interrelated in autistic children, while intolerance of uncertainty also operates across diagnostic categories (MacLennan, Rossow, and Tavassoli 2021; Carleton 2016). Heteropathy transfers these mechanisms into a political question: what happens when an economy systematically rewards controllable exposure?

Here “synthetic autism” can name a form of subjectivation, never a diagnosis and never acquired autism: dependence on environments that anticipate preferences, regulate intensity and provide exits. The subject can consume war, pornography, catastrophe and hatred at breakfast because the thumb remains sovereign over the screen, yet a slow colleague, a crying child, a smell in the bus or a disagreement without a mute button becomes unbearable. The external world is too much; the formatted world is never enough. Hungry attention grows inside a fragile sensory world.

Alienation builds the bubble. Heteropathy makes dependence on it self-reinforcing. Synthetic autism describes the life-form that begins to mistake customization for freedom and reality’s refusal to cooperate for aggression. The decisive clinical difficulty is now exact: helping a person tolerate what is not dangerous without training them to submit to what actually is.

Liviu Poenaru

REFERENCES

Carleton, R. Nicholas. 2016. “Into the Unknown: A Review and Synthesis of Contemporary Models Involving Uncertainty.” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 39: 30–43.

MacLennan, Keren, Timothy Rossow, and Teresa Tavassoli. 2021. “The Relationship between Sensory Reactivity, Intolerance of Uncertainty and Anxiety Subtypes in Preschool-Age Autistic Children.” Autism 25 (8): 2305–16.2.