The Real Cost of Looking Away
The following excerpt is adapted from a publicly shared post. Identifying details have been removed for care and safety.
“A video showing real-world violence is circulating widely online. It appeared without warning while scrolling and was difficult to process.
If you are not desensitized to seeing people harmed on social media, this may be a moment to step away, adjust your feed settings, or take a break.
We are living through a time where exposure to violence is constant, and managing what we see has become necessary for mental health.”
By A Voice from the Commons
On disengagement, self-care, and responsibility
A familiar response surfaced again this week as graphic state violence circulated across social media feeds: log off, mute, take a break, protect your mental health.
This reflection was written in response to moments like the one excerpted here — where care, withdrawal, and responsibility collide in real time.
The impulse is understandable. As one participant in a public discussion put it, constant digital dystopia is difficult to digest for anyone who is not made of iron on the inside. The compression of real-time death into autoplay—stripped of context, warning, or care—is not something human beings evolved to process. Anger, grief, and fear accumulate quickly when violence is delivered algorithmically and without consent.
This matters. Mental health is not a buzzword; it is a real and fragile condition for many. Another voice in the same exchange emphasized that for some people, stepping back is not avoidance but survival.
photo by Ron Lach
Where Care Turns Into Withdrawal
But there is a line, quiet and easy to cross, where protection turns into resignation.
The issue is not that people need rest, boundaries, or distance. The issue is when disengagement becomes the default moral response to violence rather than a temporary pause that leads back to clarity, solidarity, or action in whatever form is possible. When the first collective instinct is to look away, curate feeds, or normalize horror as “too much to hold,” we are no longer managing exposure—we are training ourselves out of responsibility.
Witnessing is not the same as consuming trauma endlessly. It does not require doom-scrolling or self-harm by exposure. But it does require refusing normalization. It requires allowing anger to exist long enough to mean something. It requires staying oriented toward the fact that what feels overwhelming on a screen is unbearable in real life for the people living it.
One participant in the discussion described being firmly on the side of resistance, naming anger not as a weakness but as a response to injustice. That anger is not something to be medicated away by silence. It is information. Historically, it is one of the few forces that has ever interrupted entrenched harm.
The language of self-care has become necessary in late capitalism—but it has also been quietly repurposed as a tool of withdrawal. A way to exit the room without naming the fire. A way to feel ethical without taking on discomfort, risk, or responsibility.
History does not move because people felt regulated. It moves because people refused to look away forever.
Rest when you must. Protect yourself when you need to. But do not confuse disappearance with care, or silence with safety. Disengagement cannot be where responsibility ends.
If we want to understand how we got here, we have to be honest about how often we chose not to stay present.
Credits & Context
This piece draws from a public online discussion. Contributors referenced have chosen to remain anonymous for mental-health reasons. Their perspectives are shared with consent and care.
Editorial Note:
This context is included to clarify the conditions under which this piece was written, not to single out individuals or amplify harm. All identifying details have been removed for mental-health and safety reasons.