the scroll is killing me
on overstimulation, disconnection, and the emotional violence of modern media
within five minutes of scrolling, i watched a video of a woman running through rubble, her son’s arm still in her hands. i double tapped. two seconds later, a meme made me laugh. then an infographic told me a genocide was occurring, and moments after that, i saw an advert for a women’s razor in a pastel pink bathroom. i learned something devastating, then i forgot it just as quickly. of course i care, but i am trained to move on.
what we are experiencing is not just an overwhelming exposure to information but media designed to overstimulate. we are not asked to witness suffering so that we can understand it. it is so that we may witness it and allow the algorithm to determine what keeps us online the longest. the cruelty of the internet is not just in the content but in the pacing. it is relentless. and in that relentlessness, the human mind—designed to process grief, shock, horror, and joy one at a time—is forced into collapse.
humans were not built to hold this much. we are now so accustomed to mixing pain with entertainment, tragedy with humour, that we cannot recognise the cost. we grieve for strangers, celebrate engagements, laugh at edits, rage at injustice, and bookmark skincare routines. and that’s all before lunch. straight out of sleep we are opening this electronic box and bombarded with the world’s knowledge before we can even turn over in bed. it’s no longer just about attention spans; it’s about the emotional bandwidth required to exist online. we are demanded to care at all times, but not too much. to stay informed, but never overwhelmed. to post, but only what’s appropriate. and when our nervous systems finally fray from all this moral juggling, we are blamed for being “too sensitive” or “not doing enough.”
this is what the attention economy feeds on. it doesn’t just profit off your curiosity—it profits off your confusion, your fatigue, your fear of missing out. every time you scroll, your reactions become data. your clicks become currency. and the more emotionally jarring the content, the longer you stay. we don’t process violence as violence anymore—we process it as content. the more shocking, the more viral. the more tragic, the more “engaging.” and in this system, human suffering is not just visible—it’s profitable.
people often say “don’t look away,” and while that sentiment feels righteous, it ignores the deeper issue: looking has become passive. viewing any and all types of injustice is no longer about learning or action—it’s a performance of moral currency. “awareness” itself has been reduced to a visual aesthetic, an online presence, an obligation to be seen “seeing”. in the same way we once documented birthdays or brunches, we now document our political outrage. the sincerity of it is not always lost, but it is diluted. we’ve blurred the line between care and curation.
but this isn’t entirely our fault. the internet rewards those who perform. when you react quickly and decisively, you’re praised for your moral clarity. when you pause to reflect, you risk being seen as indifferent. the demand for instantaneous response means we rarely ask ourselves how we truly feel. instead, we ask: what’s the right thing to say? what are other people saying? am i late? am i loud enough?
so many of us move through the internet like this: trying to balance anger with correctness, grief with strategy, and trauma with tone. we share slideshows of war accompanied by soft lo-fi music. we upload crying videos. we turn our pain into content, often because it feels like the only way to make it visible. but what happens when everything becomes visible? when every pain, every death, every atrocity is documented, re-shared, and picked apart in a comments section?
we become numb. that’s what happens.
in some ways this could be psychic numbing—the phenomenon where increased exposure to suffering leads to emotional detachment. the more we see, the less we feel. it’s not that we don’t care; it’s that we don’t know how to care anymore. how do you sit with the image of a bombed hospital and still get up to make your morning coffee? how do you hold space for a murdered child and still check your emails?
somewhere along the way, volume was mistaken for value. as if witnessing enough horror would make us better people and surely someone will do something about it. but witnessing is not the same as understanding. scrolling is not the same as solidarity. and knowing is not the same as doing. yet we continue, every day, to scroll. not because we are desperate to feel something that isn’t this relentless flood of emptiness disguised as engagement.
the problem is compounded by the platforms themselves. these technologies were not built to make you thoughtful—they were built to make you stay. and the easiest way to keep someone online is to keep them in a state of emotional disorientation. tragedy, followed by thirst traps. injustice, followed by jokes. heartbreak, followed by hauls. everything in the same stream. everything flattened into the same value. everything made consumable.
and we keep going because we don’t know what else to do. if we log off, we feel guilty. if we stay on, we feel sick. we live in a loop of helpless empathy. we are too informed and too immobilised. we know too much and can do too little. and no one has told us how to grieve for the things we cannot fix.
we have turned mourning into a metric. compassion into a carousel. every emotion is now an aesthetic. and in the endless stream of images, one horror replacing the next, we have lost the ability to tell when something truly matters to us. we perform grief, perform outrage, perform allyship—and somewhere beneath that, something real still exists. but it is buried under filters, formats, and five-second attention spans. we need to slow down. but the platforms won’t let us. stillness does not sell. reflection does not trend.
so we keep watching. we keep reacting. we keep breaking.
and the scroll keeps going.