A particular kind of morning would have been impossible for most of human history. You wake with no knowledge whatsoever of the earthquake. You do not yet know about the famine, the bombed apartment block, or the woman screaming beside a body. You certainly do not know that your favourite punk singer has died. You know only that you need coffee. This is the scale of your moral and intellectual universe at 8:07 a.m.Then you pick up the phone.
Two minutes later you have travelled several thousand miles without leaving the kitchen. A building folds into itself somewhere on another continent. People run through dust. You watch a man digging through rubble with his hands. Then, with the serene confidence of an algorithm that sees no particular reason why these things should not sit beside one another, you are informed that the punk singer has died. Beneath that is a cat doing karaoke. The cat is genuinely funny. This now seems inappropriate because the next image is of a dismembered body.
So you keep scrolling.
There is war, another war, an atrocity from three years ago returned this morning with the freshness of breaking news. A woman screams beside someone who may be her son. The numbers are staggering: dead, injured, displaced, missing. A humanitarian organisation has issued a statement. Somebody in the comments says that silence is complicity. Somebody else says that if you can look away from this, you are part of the problem. You hadn’t intended to look away, but you also hadn’t intended to spend the morning looking. Somehow this distinction has become morally suspicious.
The kettle clicks off.
Half an hour has passed. Nothing in the kitchen has changed. The cup is where you left it. Outside, somebody is reversing a car badly. Yet internally you have been transported through earthquake, bereavement, absurdity, war, moral accusation and grief. You have seen people die in places you have never visited and encountered suffering over which you possess almost no influence. Your body has nevertheless received all of it as experience: image, voice, scream, face, blood.
For most of human history, natural limits constrained how much distant suffering could enter ordinary consciousness. Geography, time and the slow transmission of information imposed boundaries on what a person could witness. We tended to regard these limits as limitations: the provincialism of earlier life, the narrow horizon modern communications would liberate us from. And, for a while, this liberation felt extraordinary.
The early digital world carried an almost revolutionary optimism. Governments and broadcasters would no longer completely determine what could be seen. Information could travel around censorship. Ordinary people could document events themselves. We would not merely read descriptions but see photographs and recordings, sometimes almost as events unfolded. Reality, it seemed, was becoming more accessible.
But technological euphoria usually reveals its darker side slowly. We invent capacities before we understand what living with them will do to us. Standing in my kitchen one morning, realising that an hour had disappeared and that the day already felt strangely hopeless after everything I had witnessed before breakfast, a rather simple thought occurred to me: our capacity to witness has expanded far beyond our capacity to act.
A person in London can now encounter, before finishing a cup of coffee, bombed apartments in Ukraine, famine in Sudan, the aftermath of an earthquake thousands of miles away, and footage of an atrocity committed years ago but recirculated this morning as though it were happening now. For the nervous system, the distinction between distant and immediate is not always particularly useful. An event may be geographically remote, historically old and entirely outside our sphere of influence, yet arrive in experience with extraordinary vividness.
We have therefore entered a peculiar psychological condition: something like cosmic witnessing without cosmic agency. We can see far beyond the field of our power, and we are only beginning to understand what living inside that discrepancy does to us.
Many people sensed the problem early and attempted small rebellions against it. We deleted apps. We experimented with digital detoxes. We switched off notifications and occasionally congratulated ourselves for surviving a weekend without social media. Yet withdrawing became progressively harder as the world itself seemed to grow more alarming. Then came the pandemic.
For months we were exposed not only to mass mortality and fear of illness but to loneliness, social disintegration, political conflict, images of violence and competing accounts of reality. Many of us felt that the world would never be the same again. That intuition was probably correct, although perhaps not in quite the way we imagined. Outside the screen, much of ordinary life eventually returned. Inside the digital environment, something had changed more profoundly.
Catastrophe became continuous. One war displaced another. At the same time, the technology became more immersive, more personalised and increasingly capable of learning exactly what would keep our attention. Eventually many of us gave up trying to give it up. We became permanent witnesses.
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I. When Looking Away Becomes a Moral Problem
The twentieth century taught us, for very good reasons, to distrust indifference. We grew up with terrible historical questions. How did ordinary people continue their ordinary lives while their neighbours disappeared? How could atrocities unfold while others went to work, ate dinner, attended concerts and put their children to bed? Why did nobody intervene? How could they not have known? These questions became part of our moral education
But social media has inserted this historical inheritance into an environment in which witnessing has no natural conclusion. There is no final newspaper edition and no geographical horizon beyond which the suffering becomes inaccessible. The stream simply continues. Increasingly, the material that reaches us is not emotionally neutral information. It is designed, selected, shared and circulated through highly charged moral frames. Watching becomes associated with refusing silence; sharing becomes evidence of solidarity. Emotional involvement can feel like proof that one has understood which side of history one ought to be standing on.
Under these conditions, giving up social media is no longer merely stopping. It can begin to feel like a moral decision. The horror of war may make you desperately want to look away, while the moral meaning attached to witnessing tells you that “looking away is precisely what a decent person must not do”. Closing the screen brings relief, but now even relief can carry a small residue of guilt. How can I make coffee, meet a friend, laugh at something stupid, or enjoy an evening while people are dying?
Beneath this question may lie another, more psychologically revealing one: Who do I fear becoming if I stop watching? Indifferent? Selfish? Cowardly? Complacent? Perhaps even one of those ordinary people whom history later condemns for carrying on with ordinary life while something terrible happened elsewhere?
This may be one reason why apparently modest advice to put the phone away, check the news once a day, and not watch graphic material before bed can provoke resistance disproportionate to the habit itself. The person may hear it not as protecting your attention, but as caring less. And here the problem becomes psychologically more interesting.
Moral concern does not only connect us to other people. It also connects us to an image of ourselves. I encounter another person’s suffering and feel compassion. Through that compassion, I also encounter myself as someone capable of compassion. There is nothing false or pathological about this. Moral identity is part of ordinary human life. The difficulty begins when the relationship becomes circular: I am distressed because I care, but gradually the intensity of my distress becomes evidence that I care. Remaining distressed reassures me that I have not become indifferent. Reducing my exposure, by contrast, begins to feel dangerously close to reducing my humanity.
Fear intensifies the cycle because fear normally prepares us to do something. We escape, protect, warn, hide, confront, seek help. Digital witnessing can repeatedly mobilise exactly the same bodily alarm in relation to events over which we have almost no practical control. Something terrible is happening, and the organism prepares for response, but there is nowhere for the response to go.
Information then becomes one of the few available forms of movement. We search for another report, another expert, another video, another explanation. The tenth piece of information may change absolutely nothing about the event, but a brief check reduces uncertainty. It creates a sensation of remaining engaged rather than helpless. Then something new appears, and the cycle begins again. What is being sought may therefore not be pleasure at all, but momentary relief from the intolerable position of the helpless witness.
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II. The Psychological Problem of Our Time
The suffering that reaches us is real. It can affect us profoundly. Yet our ability to answer it is radically disproportionate to our ability to receive it. We receive the cry, but have nowhere proportionate to put the response. What results is not indifference but something closer to its opposite: an excess of responsiveness without sufficient agency. The world enters us incessantly while remaining largely beyond our capacity to answer it.
Something strangely archaic about this very modern condition. Earlier moral cultures sometimes attached virtue to the capacity to endure suffering. Our technological environment has inadvertently created an almost unlimited supply of suffering to witness, while contemporary moral culture can offer powerful reasons to keep witnessing it. Distress can therefore acquire a secondary, paradoxical meaning: it does not merely hurt; it can become evidence of solidarity, empathy, or moral goodness.
This does not mean that compassion is false, that political concern is pathological, or that people should retreat into comfortable ignorance. The question is subtler than that. Every historical period seems to produce not only its characteristic technologies and institutions but its characteristic forms of psychological predicaments. Freud encountered patients whose suffering could not be understood without the sexual prohibitions, family structures and moral conventions of his time. Later psychologies had to reckon with alienation, conformity, consumerism, identity and the changing organisation of work and intimacy.
Our own period may require psychology to ask questions that earlier theories had little reason to formulate. What happens to a human being whose perceptual access to suffering becomes effectively global while their agency remains stubbornly local? What happens when technologies designed to capture attention intersect with genuine compassion, historical memory, political identity and the fear of moral indifference? And what happens when suffering itself begins to function as reassurance that one remains a good person?
For psychotherapy, this creates a particularly delicate problem. It cannot simply instruct the person to care less. Nor should it confuse psychological health with comfortable disengagement from the world. But neither should therapy automatically treat unlimited exposure, helpless arousal and repetitive witnessing as evidence of new conditions of worth. Perhaps one of the questions psychotherapy needs to learn to ask in our particular historical moment is this:
When distress is experienced as evidence of moral goodness, how can therapy help a person relinquish unnecessary suffering without appearing to ask them to relinquish conscience?
This is more than a question of screen hygiene. It suggests that the boundaries of psychological formulation themselves may need widening. Something is happening between nervous system and technology, compassion and helplessness, historical memory and moral identity, social belonging and political narrative, genuine human suffering and the machinery that exploits us through the representation of suffering.
Perhaps the difficulty belongs precisely there: in the space between our newly enormous capacity to witness and our still profoundly human limits on what we can actually do.
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