I watched a live video of a village being destroyed. How do I respond to tragedy, and to the scary things I witness daily? How do I handle it?
This question becomes universal, even if you never articulate it in so many words.
Our experience with the world, our engagement with it, is steeped in anxiety and uncertainty.
Years ago, newspapers spewed sensational headlines. Later, we got our daily dose of a crumbling society on TV. Now, the 24/7 scroll sits in your hand, ready to be consumed at any moment. The online sludge of so-called content seeps into offline reality. You can avoid the screen, but not the hysterical neighbor who has heard yet another apocalyptic tale.
So, how do we respond?
Begin by asking what a response even is. Responses live in the aftermath of reactions. Some are planned, rehearsed, and preempted. Others are like events themselves: sudden, overwhelming, unpredictable. Viral culture thrives on this. Slap a laugh track on someone’s reaction and it is instantly shareable: LOL. ROFL. LMFAO.
But here’s the truth: nothing in this world provides a manual for “handling” everything you might encounter.
More often than not, I find myself sitting with the wreckage, taking stock, realizing I’ve received a small grace, a breath, a pause, that others never got.
Maybe survival itself is the most practical response, rather than chasing guidelines you will forget.
I had some harrowing experiences in my life, where I realized that often, surviving that initial storm is the thing. Try this thought experiment: your boat capsizes, you are catapulted into the waves. There in the chaos, are you constructing a philosophical treatise for survival, concocting an Insta-ready post, or will you, in Maslow-esque style, search for a bloody piece of floating wreckage to hold on to while you figure out the next step?
What if it’s not that extreme, or life-threatening? You got triggered, yet again, by someone’s comment about a global disaster .
For myself, I hold to two caveats:
Whatever happens, as long as it is in my power, my reaction will not make this worse for me.
And my response will not harm others.
The biggest reprieve in any tragedy is the luxury of a little time, the space to reframe what just happened.
And sometimes the only honest response is admitting that watching the world collapse is entertainment disguised as news.
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I think that there are a few things to deal with here, the first being bias. What we mean by news is ‘bad’ news and we’re not offered any perspective with which to understand its real world prevalence and impact. The second thing is to ask what impact it has for me, my life, society and even country and is an impact even likely? So thirdly we need to understand that we’re soaking up misery without scale. Watching the news is a biased pessimistic pastime which has consequences for our real, lived lives and mental well being. Lastly, we need to ask, what can I actually and practically do about what I am seeing? If the answer is nothing, including any post on social media, then maybe it is time to defenestrate the television and get on with our own lives and living in the real world.