June 23, 2025

From distant lands a new war seems to have erupted. Reaching to me with images of collapse, of death, of the end. The screen is a relentless exposure machine, the visual language of crisis reaches us instantly, collapsing distance and time. It is difficult to tell where information ends and affect begins. Is this awareness, or another form of vampirism.

It is said this is adulthood, to feel the ache of every sad story, to be aware of every global occurrence. We are conditioned to care about everything and, paradoxically, nothing in particular. The news cycle is a monster that feeds negativity, it demands from people a constant state of paranoia. We mourn, rage, comment, but we are never truly engaged.

Many of the conflicts dominating our feeds have no immediate connection to our lives, yet we find ourselves drawn into them, speaking with conviction, aligning ourselves with sides. This is not necessarily empathy, it is often the ego at work. In a fragmented world, people reach for meaning by attaching themselves to grand narratives. Outrage becomes a form of self-expression, and morality becomes performance.

The discourse surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict has become a proxy battlefield for global anxieties. People with no personal, religious, or political connection to either side engage with fervor, not out of informed solidarity, but because participation gives shape to their moral self-image. They become part of something bigger, not by understanding it, but by reacting to it.

But while we are busy reacting, we often neglect what is within reach. Global events out of our control become scapegoats to divert our attention away to what we dread confronting. It becomes easier to argue about distant wars than to mend relationships, to engage in community work, or to confront our own contradictions. So we outsource our care to causes oceans away. We raise flags, post slogans, debate on digital battlegrounds. Yet the decay in our own homes, our own minds, remains undisturbed.

And so, the fire continues to burn, both without and within, unchecked and unacknowledged.