Filter Fatigue: Definition and Concept Paper

This paper defines Filter Fatigue as the cognitive exhaustion produced by continuous relevance filtering in representation-heavy environments, where personalization, weak provenance, and abundant plausible outputs shift the burden of maintaining context and meaning onto the individual. The defining burden is epistemic rather than simply a matter of excessive choice. Individuals must repeatedly determine what is real, relevant, original, trustworthy, or sufficiently grounded. As platforms pre-sort, rank, personalize, and optimize experience, users increasingly absorb the work of supplying context, evaluating provenance, comparing alternatives, and deciding what deserves attention. Within the Reality Drift framework, Filter Fatigue describes the cognitive cost of living inside systems where the production and circulation of representations outpace the mechanisms that once constrained and contextualized them. The responsibility for maintaining orientation progressively shifts from the system to the individual.