One moment, you’re crying with laughter at a TikTok of someone stuffing as many grapes as humanly possible in their mouth. Next, you’re hit with footage of a bombing. A school shooting. A hate crime. You pause. You feel something, perhaps. But then the next video loads, and that feeling is gone as quickly as it came.
We’re constantly bouncing between hilarity and catastrophe, and somewhere in that back and forth, we stopped reacting the way humans are supposed to. Worse than that? We’ve started treating it all the same. It’s not just that we’ve become desensitized to these tragedies. We’ve also become more okay with being horrible to each other, which, I guess, isn’t a new concept, but seems to have been amplified in recent years. And somehow… no one really cares.
Social media very obviously wasn’t built for nuance and sophisticated, grounded discussions about the state of the world. It’s fast and addictive, you’re not supposed to think too hard when you’re doom-scrolling. But you don’t just scroll past a singular crisis anymore, you scroll past all of them. War. Death. Injustice. One after another. Until, at some point, they just become background noise.
“I feel guilty sometimes because I don’t even react to some of this stuff anymore,” said Jeree Apan (10). “I used to. But now I just keep scrolling.”
And why wouldn’t we? Every day we’re overloaded with pain we can’t fix. The more we see, the more emotionally desensitized we become to what’s being depicted on social media.
I think Susan Sontag puts it in the best way, having once said, “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing ‘we’ can do—but who is that ‘we?’—and nothing ‘they’ can do either—and who are ‘they?’—then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”
That quote remains true, even after the two decades since it’s been written. We’re shown so much pain, so often, with so little direction that, eventually, the feelings pile up, and if we don’t act on them, or rather, if we can’t act on them, they fade, rot, and eventually disappear. We’re left with emptiness and a nagging feeling that nothing really matters. Not because it doesn’t, but because we’ve been so used to thinking that it doesn’t.
Even with the people posting content, we see similar problems. It’s no longer about self expression or enjoyment anymore, it’s about attention. Plain and simple. And attention doesn’t care if you’re kind, thoughtful, or even decent, it just wants you to be loud. So now we see people mocking victims, laughing at tragedies, saying things online that no one would dare say face to face, obviously. Making cruelty a punchline. Turning insensitivity into your brand.
“I’ve seen people record someone clearly in distress, just to post it for attention,” Hannah Uesugi (10) said. “Nobody steps in. They just laugh and film.”
And these are things the algorithm rewards with views and clicks. Disrespect is entertaining. Outrage drives views. Being a jerk gets you attention. So people keep doing it, and everyone else just scrolls by. Maybe because it’s easier not to. We all live in it. We’ve all probably laughed at something we shouldn’t have. Maybe we’ve even posted things that crossed a line. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to do something.
We can choose to stop giving attention to people who make cruelty their entire personality. We can speak up when someone’s clearly crossed a line. We can remind ourselves, and each other, that empathy shouldn’t be embarrassing. That silence is in itself a reaction. And that kindness doesn’t necessarily make you soft, in fact, I actually think It makes you a little more sane.
“Not caring is treated like a personality trait now,” said Emily Hsieh (10). “But honestly? I think caring is a lot harder.”
And that’s exactly the truth. Caring takes effort. It takes slowing down in the social media apps specifically designed to keep you scrolling and scrolling. It should entail sitting with the uncomfortable feelings, instead of shoving them with distasteful and insensitive humor. It means being human–fully, painfully, and honestly human–in the social media spaces that constantly tells you not to be.
