There is a quiet dread that has been settling in, an uncomfortable pulse beneath the noise of our everyday lives.
It creeps in while we’re watching the news, when we catch a glimpse of a headline we’d rather not read, when we hear ourselves rehearsing explanations that let us look away. I find myself sitting with that dread more often now, wrestling with a growing dissonance between the stories we tell and the truths we live alongside. Recent events unfolding around the world have only sharpened this edge, exposing not just the contradictions of geopolitics but something deeper, something that seems to be unraveling within us.
It is not just about borders and wars. It is not only about which flag stands where. It is the aching realization that the very institutions we hold up as defenders of democracy often collapse into silence when their voices are most needed. It is the soft betrayals – the quiet omissions, the carefully crafted neutrality, the polished statements that say nothing at all – that chip away at the credibility we so eagerly claim. And while the silence of institutions is unsettling, the silence within our communities, within ourselves, is perhaps even more so.
We are living in a time when the comfort of distance is dangerously easy to claim. There is a soothing lie that proximity is what determines responsibility – that if it’s happening far enough away, to people we do not know, in languages we do not speak, then we can keep scrolling, keep walking, keep talking about lighter things. But distance has never been a valid excuse, and silence has never been a neutral stance. What happens to others is not outside the circle of our concern. If anything, our silence often extends the life of what we claim to oppose.
The growing dread is not just about what is happening. It is about how we are learning to live with it. There is a slow numbing, a normalization of fracture, a quiet surrender to contradictions that would have once rattled us. We seem to have perfected the art of sitting in discomfort without moving. The dissonance is no longer a sharp crack – it has become a low, persistent hum that we’ve trained ourselves to ignore.
This is what troubles me most. That we are becoming fluent in the language of selective empathy. That we know exactly when to speak up and when to stay silent, when to care and when to retreat into our curated bubbles. That we have slowly traded moral courage for moral convenience, finding comfort in statements that sound right but cost nothing.
What’s striking is how easily we’ve slipped into the belief that information is enough. As if knowing is the same as doing. As if being informed is the same as being involved. We consume events as if they are episodes, as if the suffering of others is programming that we can watch, process, and move on from. We mistake awareness for action, when awareness without engagement is just another form of disengagement. And I say this not as someone looking out from a higher ground, but as someone caught in the very same loops of hesitation and self-protection.
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten that neutrality in the face of injustice is not a virtue. The absence of a stand is not the presence of balance. When we choose to disengage, when we wrap ourselves in the safety of detachment, we are not escaping the problem – we are becoming part of its architecture.
It would be easy to call this a crisis of geopolitics, but it feels more like a crisis of imagination. The slow erosion of our ability to picture a world where our words and our silences actually matter. The shrinking of our sense of what we are responsible for. The loss of belief that we can carry more than just our own stories.
And yet, there is something profoundly human in this struggle. It is hard to hold all this. It is hard to look at injustice squarely without becoming overwhelmed, without slipping into cynicism or paralysis. It is hard to keep our hearts open in a world that constantly invites us to shut them down. But perhaps this is the work – to resist the pull towards comfortable numbness, to keep choosing to see even when seeing is hard, to keep feeling even when feeling costs us something.
We live in an age where it has never been easier to know and yet never more tempting to avoid. The question, then, is not just whether we are paying attention – but whether we are willing to be changed by what we see.
There is no clean conclusion here. No neatly tied bow. I am simply trying to stay awake to the dissonance, to sit with it long enough to understand what it is asking of me. Perhaps that’s all any of us can do – stay honest, stay present, stay human. And maybe, just maybe, find the courage to speak when silence feels safer.