Jennie Yao is the one of the winners of the Harbinger Prize 2025. This is her winning entry.

Never before have we been so connected to global tragedy, yet felt so incapable of responding to it. Today, tragedy is omnipresent, woven seamlessly into the digitalscape. On social media, images of violence, suffering and catastrophe from current wars, genocides and massacres around the globe drift beside comedy skits and advertisements as if interchangeable fragments of the same stream.

This coexistence erodes the gravity of each event until every disaster dissolves into indistinct noises of calamity. What emerges is not apathy but survival; the human mind, unfit to withstand excessive pain, grows numb.

Empathy fatigue

The exhausted response to an overexposure of suffering – known as “compassion fade” – is a phenomenon once used to describe frontline caregivers; now it belongs to ordinary netizens. This term, coined by American psychology professor Paul Slovic in 2014, describes a psychological process that depletes the human capacity for emotional resonance with suffering, leading to an inability to register loss.

The online world produces distance rather than intimacy. In 2023, a Pew Research Center study found that 38% of teens reported feeling emotionally “overwhelmed” by the amount of tragedy they encountered online, yet most admitted they continued scrolling anyway.

“Human beings are not wired to process tragedy at scale,” says Dr. Lila Deng, a clinical psychologist. “When grief becomes an everyday occurrence in your feed, your brain defends itself by shutting down, not because you don’t care, but because you cannot possibly care about everything at once.”

Apathy affects how we think and act. As public awareness decreases, empathy – the fuel of social solidarity – weakens, and with it, political will and activism. Democracy faces erosion without sustained outrage. Citizens are less likely to protest corruption, resist authoritarianism or hold leaders accountable. In such silence, freedom fades away.

Algorithms and distress

Imagery of suffering draws attention because it demonstrates the fragility of the human condition. Social media platforms capitalise on the human tendency to empathise with tragedy for engagement; even when users do not seek it, the spectacle finds them.

As a result, marginalised groups such as Indigenous communities – who are both heavily stereotyped and invisible on social media – bear the burden of even less advocacy and allies on their behalf. In this way, the algorithm unethically feeds us information. We scroll past injustice, but don’t demand change; there is no pressure to address crises such as poverty, war or climate change. Social cohesion is thereby diminished.

Cognitive overload

One of the most corrosive features of the digital age is cognitive overload, which is most clearly manifested in the act of doomscrolling.

While social media platforms increase their branding as advocates for so-called “mental well-being”, they simultaneously exploit negative emotion, feeding users a constant stream of tragedies. This creates an ironically stark contradiction: a severe imbalance in our online information feed.

Psychological consequences following mass desensitisation is manifested in the mental health of Gen Z. Several intertwined psychological forces that arise from our relationship with social media govern this phenomenon: negativity bias ensures that content centred on suffering and threat clings tighter to our attention rather than positive stories; information overload overwhelms our cognitive filters, and turns awareness into paralysis instead of action.

A 2025 Mental Health Canada report found that Gen Z who spend more than seven hours of screen time on social media platforms experience twice as much depression, anxiety and distress. As chronic anxiety and sadness are normalised, psychological numbness takes root, which weakens reasoned judgment, frays solidarity and limits collective imagination for long-term solutions.

From shock to background noise

Repeated exposure steadily drains tragedy of its emotional weight: images and reports that once provoked outrage now pass with little more than a glance.

As people attempt to take an upright moral stance, performative activism flourishes. Hashtags, reposts, emojis and fleeting slogans allow individuals to signal awareness while avoiding the discomfort of meaningful engagement, a growing form of compassion fade.

Dr. Deng explains that these signals of outrage are not inherently bad. But when they replace sustained engagement, “they create the illusion of solidarity while deepening the reality of disengagement.”

The greater danger lies in habituation: as atrocity is reframed into another genre of consumable content, the reflexive human response of moral alarm dulls into passive observation.

Ironically, instead of inspiring change, netizens’ desensitised minds have reframed atrocities as entertainment. Israeli missiles fired into Iran were romanticised on X because they resembled bright shooting stars falling from the sky. The world is in a period of unprecedented tension, yet some Gen Zs merely joke about “Outfits for WW3” on TikTok.

This cultural recalibration silences victims and steadily reshapes society’s threshold for outrage, leaving the moral compass dysfunctional and increasingly fragile. The human cost becomes overshadowed.

The way forward

To scroll with intention, to linger rather than reflexively share, to pursue stories past their headlines: these are small yet radical gestures of resistance against an economy that monetises despair.

Desensitisation is not destiny but decision, sculpted by the habits through which we inhabit digital culture. If we learn to resist the seduction of passive consumption, to cultivate depth in place of velocity, then outrage may recover its true vocation: not a fleeting spark of reaction, but the enduring fire of transformation.