How is life treating you?
Are you in good health? How is your family? Do you have children? Do they have a bright future ahead of them? Will they be able to find jobs? How is your financial situation? And what about your thoughts on the war? News of war is everywhere. Are you and your children ready to enlist and die? Oh! You don’t want to be a martyr? But isn’t that what war is? People die in wars. You could lose your home, your family, your friends, your children, or your limbs in an attack. You or your loved ones could become prisoners of war. Does that sound too horrific? Yet, we see these things on the news every day, give them a “like,” and move on. WAIT! Do you think this is a cliché topic?
Or have we become emotionally blind to these stories simply because they haven’t happened to us yet?
If you aren’t worried about these things, it’s not because you think “my government will protect me.” You see it in the news; governments have been known to kill their own civilians just to create a pretext for war. You aren’t worried because you think of yourself as a “spectator.” It is an illusion of physical and psychological distance. Pain viewed through a screen always belongs to “someone else.” The screen functions as a shield; it detaches the viewer, turning them from a witness into a mere spectator. This state of spectatorship dilutes the reality of the suffering.
Think about it: would the death of a neighbor you see and love every day affect you more, or the death of a celebrity you see and love every day but only through a screen?
There was a time when, hearing about a disaster would leave a deep ache in one’s heart. Hearing news of an earthquake on the radio or seeing a war photograph in a newspaper would haunt people for days; it would shake them and move them to action. Today, an image of a natural disaster slides off our screens with a flick of a finger; a minute later, it’s replaced by a trending video, an ad, or an influencer’s vacation pose. In this flow, both agony and joy are leveled out, swept away in the same algorithmic river.
A death report is no longer a “tragedy“; it is merely “content.” And the reason we like or share this content isn’t that we feel the pain, it’s an effort to certify that we appear “sensitive.” Black profile pictures and canned phrases like “my prayers are with you…” These are not acts of emotional engagement; they are social rituals. The purpose of this ritual isn’t to share the pain, but to signal a moral position. On social media, even grief has become an element of personal branding.
Take Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “Hyperreality”: an image from an earthquake zone begins to be perceived as more “real” than the tragedy itself. People look at the screen not to alleviate the pain, but to “consume” the image of it.
And Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”: “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” Emotions are no longer meant to be felt; they are meant to be “displayed.” This hollows out the emotion; only the form (the post) remains, while the essence (the feeling) evaporates.
Let me tell you just how desensitized people have become: If you take the time to search the Epstein files, you won’t find anything about “child meat,” “blood,” or “adrenochrome.” The only reality is CHILD ABUSE. But apparently, that wasn’t horrific enough for people, so they engaged with and believed the fake news instead. Because the amygdala, the center for fear and empathy, has been so overexposed to shocking news that it now requires something more extreme than child abuse to be triggered. Like drug addicts who constantly need a stronger hit.
Worse yet: the stories of “children tortured and sacrificed for their meat and blood,” which received countless interactions, didn’t move anyone to action either. For instance, were there sanctions against the names mentioned in the files? They might not have been arrested due to “lack of evidence.” But my question isn’t for the police; it’s for the public. Do you still follow these people? Do you still buy their products? Do you ostracize them from society for these “horrific” acts? We’ve forgotten it all because the news cycle moved on, haven’t we?
I think this is the true “Dead Internet Theory.” A community of the living dead who don’t react to anything. Digital zombies.
But wait! You voiced your outrage on social media, didn’t you?
That is called “performative empathy.” Once a person feels they have “raised their voice” on social media, they lose the motivation to actually do something about it in real life. We have lost our capacity for real empathy. In psychology, this is “moral licensing”: someone who feels they’ve done something good gives themselves permission to put in less effort later. A “share” becomes as satisfying as a donation. Consequently, “awareness” campaigns on social media paradoxically turn into a relief mechanism that atrophies real action.
This isn’t a critique of social media. It’s a critique of humanity.
Why are we destroying ourselves?
I understand. we cannot react to thousands of tragedies from all over the world at the same time. Our brains automatically build a defense shield to protect us from the pain. But it’s a shield that also blunts our other emotions, especially our capacity for empathy. What we need to do is not close our eyes and ears to what is happening. We need to question. Why is this happening? Why has this become normal?
Is human nature just like this? Take wars, for example. Are you ready for war? Are you ready to kill and be killed? Sorry, movies have normalized that. Let me ask this instead: Are you ready to stay away from home? Are you ready to live without a phone or internet? Are you ready to lose your loved ones? Do you truly have someone you can’t bear to lose? Then let me ask you this: you’ve probably seen videos of prisoners of war, are you ready to endure physical torture?
Slavery used to be considered “normal.” But some people who suffered did not accept it as normal. Black people, for instance. The most famous example. Instead of accepting slavery as normal, they took action. I’m talking about non-violent action. Like the Montgomery bus boycott that lasted 381 days. Walking to work. For 381 days. Perhaps the things we consider “normal” are actually horrific, and we are just too blind to see it.
We are not spectators to what is happening in the world; we are witnesses. Future generations (if any humans remain), or aliens, or God (if you believe), will ask: “With those little devices in your pockets, you witnessed all the atrocities in the world in real-time. So, why didn’t you do anything?”
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