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In malignant conflicts, the kind that leave everyone worse off, there is the thing we argue about endlessly, to the point of stupefaction.

Ob ran his bony fingers through that last bit of hair on his head and looked down to the ground in stupefaction.

I suspect he absorbed enough of your stress pre-agreement to go through all five stages of secondhand negativity: concern, sympathetic stress, bored stupefaction, desperation, bargaining for silence.

Writing for the London Review of Books, novelist Martin Amis lamented her “somewhat top-heavy interest in madness and stupefaction — the vanished knack of ‘making things matter.’

But the purposeful sensory overload mostly yields head-spinning stupefaction, leaving a viewer feeling like Wile E. Coyote after hitting a mesa wall.