And I wake up to my phone blasting images of
murdered babies and a starving people and
“Is it cake?” Or is it AI?
But wait, a bomb just “fell”. 300 “dead”.
(What do I make for breakfast?)
Hungry. Dying. Executed. Please don’t scroll.
I won’t.
Not before I like, copy link, comment (if I have the time, of course)
And back into the belly of the beast I go.
There is too much happening.
There is always too much happening. All at once.
Genocide, occupation, surveillance, control.
Bodies regulated. Borders tightened. Lives made unlivable.
We are told to keep up. To stay informed. To care about everything. All at once.
And when we cannot, we call it ‘burnout,’ ‘compassion fatigue.’
Can compassion fatigue?
Should it? If compassion is fatiguing, who is to blame?
And more, what is compassion without action?
Fatigue derives from helplessness as control is systematically displaced. Compassion and empathy fall to the individual and when attention is saturated and support erased, connection gradually erodes.
Messages become tasks. Care becomes effort.
Where withdrawal is a relief, solitude feels like safety.
I smile at a child seeing snow for the first time
“If Obama was a cat”
Scroll.
“Key & Peele you’ve never seen”
Scroll.
“If Mort sang September”
Scroll.
“A one-year-old had a nail shoved into his leg”
Scro–
A one-year-old had a nail shoved into his leg.
And then there are “news stories” that pierce through our carefully constructed veils of detachment, jolting us into an acute awareness of how bad things have gotten and we find ourselves wondering, “How are we supposed to carry on living life normally?” But really, what does ‘normal’ even look like anymore?
‘Engineered simultaneity’ defines the conditions of our attention. This is not just about everything happening at once, but about how it is made visible to us – what we are shown, how often, and in what order. THEY are catching us in moments of constant reaction. Anger rises, followed by guilt, and both threatened by a more enduring feeling – fear. It’s what They want. Fear that we do not know enough, fear that we’ll say the wrong thing, fear that They’ll do something to us, fear that nothing we do will matter.
It settles in the body, dulling urgency into hesitation, then into silence.
Guilt is corrosive.
And I; a suit of armour on a stormy day.
Guilt is inflammatory.
A call, a demand,
A plea.
A festering wound that yearns to be seen.
Needs to be seen.
LOOK AT ME.
{Art by Sarah Jose, Vibushita and Nikita N Manae}
I’m looking.
There are multiple genocides happening right now.
I’m looking.
Big Tech is looking back. (I need to pay my rent today.)
I’m looking.
Bodies are regulated. Individual identities, now public domain.
I’m looking.
Another Dalit person was lynched. (I need to meet that deadline by tomorrow.)
I’m looking.
The earth is burning; the ocean rising.
I’m looking.
Queer lives are debated, denied, and legislated. (I need to do something about my back pain.)
I’m looking.
Hunger persists; abundance rots elsewhere, priced out of reach.
I’m looking.
I’m looking.
I’m looking. (I need to visit my grandad in the hospital.)
I’m tired.
There is a deep exhaustion that comes with caring, from witnessing, from trying to keep up with a world that refuses to slow down. But this is not personal depletion; it is the lived experience of being stretched across crises produced and sustained by larger systems. Disconnection is not accidental. Relationships are transactional, attention becomes labour, and care becomes something we must schedule. In this sense, what we are feeling is not just ‘burnout’, but a form of alienation; one that pulls us away from each other even as everything demands that we come together.
And still,
in the cracks of this relentless feed,
this endless onslaught of pain, doubt, disillusionment, grief,
something quieter insists on staying—
a refusal to go numb.
Even when that’s what They want.
Especially because that’s what They want.
In the midst of persistent acceleration, we (must) look towards spaces that do not obey the time and currency of urgency, productivity, or spectacle, where alternative temporalities emerge – time to sit, to process, to feel without immediate response or resolution. In gathering, creating, and resisting together, we refuse the demand to constantly react and instead choose to remain present in more deliberate, sustaining ways. These moments, however small, allow us to live differently: to care without depletion, to think beyond imposed limits, and to continue.
Small spaces –
not grand, not visible, not scalable
but alive.
Community –
not the ideal we keep failing to reach,
not the expansive network we cannot sustain,
but this:
A reading group
that meets without urgency,
where knowledge is turned not for output,
but understanding;
where knowledge is not performance
but a possibility for feminist imagination.
A kitchen
where food is not commodity,
but an outstretched hand,
a way of returning
to a memory glazed over,
to somewhere a little less alone.
Friends, comrades
not always present,
but there when it matters,
on the street, in the meeting,
in the pause before action.
And then,
Creation.
Not production. Not consumption.
Creation as interruption. Creation as resistance.
A song hummed, to resist silence.
A poem written, to resist erasure.
Clay moulded, to resist fragmentation.
These very words
Not prescription, nor answers, nor a pallid declaration of culpability
But a frustrated, decisive, shared attempt at resistance.
A reflection of our worries, fears, and hopes.
Perhaps even yours.
An attempt at remembering before we are forgotten.
Short Note:
This lyrical essay emerged from scrolling through our feeds and feeling frustration at how the “engineered simultaneity” of events in the world compels us to feel helpless. We respond to the ambiguity in feeling an overwhelming need to act and the realisation of numbness produced in its wake. Through this piece, we interrogate the structured responsibilisation perpetuated by these manufactured events and advocate for a shift from individualism towards intentional community-building and friendship. Also included is an artwork inspired by the piece itself and created on a sunny afternoon in a park by 3 childhood friends.
Vibushita
Vibu is a queer-feminist practitioner with a MA in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London, whose writing and work interrogates and reimagines dominant narratives of belonging, grounded in her experience working on feminist narrative-building, research and community engagement.
Sarah
Sarah is a mental health researcher, musician, and co-founding member of the Indian Liberation Psychology Lab, exploring decolonial approaches to knowledge production and praxis, grounded in work with populations affected by honour based abuse and gendered violence.