Dying Inside

I’ve been seeing photos of starved children, their eyes sunken so far into their sockets that I felt the urge to google how deep an eye socket is (around 5 centimeters), and whether there’s bone in the back of the socket that separates the eye from the brain (there is), and how on earth then does the eye connect to the brain (through something called the optic canal, which is like the skull’s equivalent of a cable-routing hole in a TV cabinet). So thin were those kids—gaunt and moribund—that you could count at a glance the number of ribs they had (12 pairs, the same number in the bodies of those who starved them).

I’ve learned that, by and large, I’m unaffected by those photos, to the extent that I could look at them while eating and it would by the grace of God-knows-what have no effect on my appetite. I could scroll through scores of them mid-bite and continue chewing while my brain’s idly figuring out what it means—what it truly means—to see the emaciated body of a child—which, judging by my lack of reaction and my continued chewing, it apparently means nothing (or that I’m dead inside).

But despite my apparent apathy, in truth, I’m half-heartedly glad/reassured (can’t possibly find the right word) that those photos are available. Some people whom I know personally and follow on Instagram repost such photos and other related but less graphic content. I like those people. This very specific digital behavior, this reposting, has inadvertently, almost overnight, become (for me) a litmus test on where people morally stood, on how trustworthy and virtuous and kindhearted they were. Which is a bit ironic, because I seldom repost such content myself, so it’s not a moral test I would personally pass. If you think this is a fundamentally stupid and unreliable indicator of people’s morals, you’re not wrong— but then imagine the harrowing alternative of asking them in person how they felt about current affairs. Heebie-jeebies at just the thought..

Another thing that’s weird is seeing those photos on Instagram. It’s disorienting that such poignant images can exist on the same level of informational hierarchy as all the garbage that’s on that platform. What separates them from the heaps of advertisements, recycled humor, self-promotion, thinly veiled pornography, and all manner of literally endless hedonism are finger gestures that we call swiping or scrolling. Those are gestures which only by the thinnest technical margins could be classified as voluntary physical actions. They’re more akin, I think, to blinking, in that they require almost no effort and are most of the time involuntary. And that’s the level of (in)action it takes these days to avert one’s gaze from tragedy and onto something completely different. That, I truly find shameful and flat out weird. Just as easily as you could see those images, gain awareness as it were of the grim reality they represent, you could (just as easily) look away from them— point your attention elsewhere.

Emphasis on awareness and attention because those—by definition—are the qualities that I lack while using that platform. I can’t seem to handle the contradiction of having my ‘awareness’ raised precisely when I’m least ‘aware’. I’m both old and old-fashioned, impressionable by the nature of the media I use. I can’t treat Instagram, for instance, as a neutral medium, one that’s just as appropriate for honest thoughts and feelings as it is for mindless leisure and commercialism. I’m also afflicted, and I’m hardly unique in this, by a dysfunctional relationship with this form of media (essentially, using it too much and dreading the fact), which in turn mars any information I receive from it, and my experience of receiving said information. Even when it’s real or important. In fact, especially then. Every time I see one of those heart-wrenching images on a small and aggressively lit screen, in the same format in which I receive so much mind-rotting schlock, I imagine being handed a pamphlet while seated on a reclining chair in a heroin den, with a tourniquet around my arm and a needle in my vein. Floating between states of consciousness, I catch a glimpse of the pamphlet’s content and register its urgency and moral salience. For a fleeting moment. Then, my eyes roll up in opioid bliss and, as it were, I scroll away.

What solves this conundrum for me are two things. First, it’s the knowledge that, for better or worse, it’s the victims’ and their families’ wishes that those images be shared— that their stories be told, whether its on the news, on Instagram, or on a milk carton. It’s not important. It’s my own privileged pedantry to lament the form in which this information is reaching me.

The cynical part of me is disheartened and worried by the fact that this particular human tragedy, that of the Palestinians, which has been going on for decades, is having its heyday in the public’s awareness now, in large part due to social media (and how graphic and immediately ‘rewarding’ social media is), and that when the dust settles, as I hope it soon will, and Palestinians are no longer brutally killed and starved at this rate for top spots in our algorithms, i.e., when they go back to being killed slowly and silently as they have been for years, that we’ll all collectively and unconsciously stop caring (or care less) and move on to the next thing. We’ll goose-step behind the algorithm. Easy come, easy go.

The second thing that reassures me is a gut feeling that younger people are less burdened and less morally disturbed by the juxtaposing mess of social media. In this regard, they’re more thick-skinned than I am. They can exist in that mess, having been born into it, without letting it weaken their convictions. And their convictions, I think, are very sound. They are posthuman, and so is their attention. Me, I’m just an unc, and I’m dead inside.