20/05/2026
Human psychology evolved to process the emotional weight of events within physical proximity. Digital networks eliminated that proximity in a generation. You now witness tragedy on another continent, compare yourself to extreme wealth in another country, and internalize success narratives from statistically exceptional individuals - all within minutes
every day.
Your brain processes all of it as immediate and personally relevant.
Emotional Proximity Distortion (EPD) formalizes this as a structural framework, quantifying the collapse of three critical boundaries:
- Distance: geographic and social
- Relevance: personal and contextual
- Probability: statistical reality vs perceived baseline
The outcome is Burnout Before Achievement - a condition where individuals exhaust themselves attempting to replicate distorted global baselines that were never representative of their actual reality.
EPD provides psychologists, digital architects, and policy makers with the unified model needed to address the systemic mental health crisis caused by the mismatch between human emotional architecture and algorithmic borderlessness. This is the framework the mental health industry has been missing. Published on Zenodo/CERN.
Prevention