The Violence I Carry in My Pocket

I have watched people die on my phone. It simply appears, folded seamlessly into the same feed that carries jokes, advertisements, photos of friends, and everything else that constitutes daily life. Videos of people being beheaded by the Taliban on YouTube — I watched those in middle school before I had the language to understand them. George Floyd dying under the weight of a police officer’s knee, his final minutes not just witnessed but circulated, replayed, and absorbed into a collective visual memory that feels both urgently important and deeply unsettling. I watched all nine minutes and 29 seconds of his murder. In AP United States History, I did not simply learn about the assassination of John F. Kennedy; I watched it, the moment of impact slowed down, replayed, and analyzed until it became less an event and more a piece of footage — something to be studied, paused, and resumed. I watched Jackie Kennedy try to stuff her husband’s brain back in his head to no avail. 

I have watched videos of self-immolation, of bodies transformed into spectacle through fire. Videos of countless emaciated bodies of both adults and children in Palestine, filmed in states of extreme vulnerability; then, in the same stream of content, the same bodies are being shot, killed, or buried beneath rubble. I was scrolling Instagram in Sept. 2025 when a reel autoplayed showing the moment Charlie Kirk was shot, with blood pouring out of his neck. I didn’t click onto it — I just watched, because the platform made it impossible not to.

Recently, I watched videos from Minneapolis: Renee Good brutally murdered in her car, her wife’s grief audible in the background, and Alex Pretti shot in the street while bystanders recorded from only a few feet away. Over spring break, in person, I saw a man overdose outside Penn Station, his body surrounded not by intervention but by a kind of collective recognition that nothing more could be done, a recognition that did not prevent the moment from being watched. And of course it was disturbing — of course it unsettled me — but because I had seen so much like it online, it didn’t feel like anything in the way it should have; the shock had already been exhausted.

And the uncomfortable truth — the one that lingers beneath all of this — is that you probably have seen this too. Not necessarily the same videos, not necessarily the same names or places, but some version of this experience: The sudden intrusion of death or violence into an otherwise ordinary moment, followed not by sustained attention or reflection, but by the next post.

Because there is always more. They appear while scrolling through Instagram, embedded in news clips, resurfacing on TikTok, detached from their original contexts and redistributed in ways that make them feel at once immediate and strangely distant. There is no clear boundary that marks them as different from everything else we consume. Instead, they are a part of the same endless stream, where the most extreme forms of human suffering coexist with entertainment, commentary, and everyday life.

This level of exposure — immediate, visual, and unrelenting — is arguably historically unprecedented. For much of human history, knowledge of violence arrived filtered through language, institutions, or temporal distance: People read about it in newspapers, heard it on the radio, or encountered it after the fact. Even the most shocking events were mediated, shaped into narrative before reaching an audience. To know about violence was not the same as to witness it. Now, that distinction has collapsed. We do not just hear that something has happened; we watch it happen. Over and over again.

The first time you see something like this, it feels like a rupture. Your body reacts before your mind can catch up — your stomach drops, your chest tightens. It lingers. It interrupts your day. It follows you into the next hour, the next conversation, the next quiet moment when it resurfaces uninvited. But the 10th time does not feel like that. Or the 50th. Or the 100th.

What once registered as shock begins to dull at the edges, not because the content itself has changed, but because your capacity to respond to it has. The deaths are just as real, but something in the emotional circuitry starts to falter under the weight of repetition. The reaction shortens, flattens, becomes easier to move past.

The most unnerving part of all this is that I don’t really know how to process it anymore. I scroll past the same kind of images that would once have left me gasping, sick, shaking — and I feel … nothing. Not apathy, not cruelty, not callousness — just a blankness that sits uncomfortably between recognition and empathy. My mind catalogues the events, notes the horror, stores them somewhere deep, but my body and my emotions no longer follow. I know I should feel something, but the stimulation for feeling has been worn away by repetition.

Sometimes I catch myself pausing, asking: Am I numb because I have become inured, or because the way I’m seeing this violence makes genuine response impossible? I can name the events, describe the deaths, recall the faces — but the visceral, human reaction that would have anchored them in me is gone, or at least dormant.

This is where something more subtle — and more unsettling — begins to take hold. I find it hard to believe that people have become inherently indifferent, yet the structure of exposure has made sustained feeling nearly impossible. When violence is constant, arriving without warning and disappearing without resolution, there is no stable emotional register to meet it. Some things still break through and provoke outrage or grief, but others — equally devastating — barely register at all. The response becomes inconsistent, unpredictable, untethered from the severity of what is being seen. 

In this way, real suffering becomes entertainment, an event to scroll past, to pause for a moment, and to move on from without reckoning with its meaning or consequences. When this cycle repeats endlessly, the act of witnessing loses its weight. The design of these platforms encourages this kind of consumption, rewarding speed and continuity over interruption or reflection. We confuse witnessing with understanding, and, in doing so, we risk believing that exposure to an image is the same as engagement with reality.

This constant, decontextualized exposure does more than change how we watch — it changes how we feel and, slowly, how we live. Numbness sets in, a quiet detachment that makes the most extreme forms of violence seem ordinary.  When everything is visible all the time, nothing feels urgent and  the extraordinary becomes routine. We risk living in a world where human suffering is not denied, but where it is filtered, mediated, and ultimately rendered manageable precisely because we are now unable to process it fully.

It’s important to recognize that not all exposure to violence is meaningless or harmful. Some videos — heartbreaking, horrifying, unavoidable — have catalyzed awareness and sparked social change. Documentation can hold power accountable, give voice to the voiceless, and force attention on injustices that might otherwise be ignored.

But there is a difference between documentation and overexposure. Over time, this flattening of emotional response can produce anxiety and dread that is less focused on individual events and more diffuse, a constant background awareness of danger without any resolution. The fact that witnessing can inform or inspire does not mean that constant, trauma-level immersion is necessary or healthy. There is a line between bearing witness and being drowned in images of suffering, between learning and being desensitized. Social consciousness thrives when information is paired with context, reflection, and human-scale responsibility; it withers when it is reduced to a relentless stream of shock designed for virality.

The question, then, is what this does to the people who grow up in this environment. To scroll through violence from breakfast to bedtime — to have every atrocity, accident, and death endlessly replayed — is to live in a world where the extraordinary becomes ordinary and the unbearable becomes background noise. We were not built to process endless, graphic violence, and yet that is precisely what the digital landscape demands of us.

We grow up in constant proximity to horror without the tools to contextualize it, respond meaningfully, or even feel it fully. Empathy can be strained to the breaking point; outrage becomes muted; moral clarity blurs. The danger is subtle but pervasive: When everything is visible, nothing feels urgent — and that might be the most dangerous normalization of all.