Lately, I’ve caught myself doing something I never thought I’d do: scrolling past war.
Not reading, not gasping, not stopping — just scrolling.
A drone strike in Kharkiv.
A hospital in Gaza.
A woman weeping in front of her flooded home in southern Brazil.
And I keep scrolling.
It’s not that I don’t care. Or maybe I’ve just grown too used to it.
That’s the terrifying part — I can’t tell anymore.
We used to believe that the great enemy of our time was misinformation.
That if we could just “know” more — understand the facts, track the sources, expose the lies — we’d be alright. We’d remain on the right side of history.
But now I wonder if the deeper threat isn’t ignorance.
It’s numbness.
A kind of slow, quiet erosion of our ability to care.
And somewhere in the back of my mind, Hannah Arendt is whispering.
“The banality of evil”
You probably know the phrase.
Maybe you’ve seen it in a headline, or on a protest sign, or misquoted in a tweet.
But Arendt meant something chillingly specific when she coined it.
She had traveled to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi bureaucrats who organized the transport of Jews to the camps. She expected a monster.
Instead, she found a man who spoke in clichés. Who deflected. Who said things like, “I was just doing my job.”
A man terrifying not because he was evil, but because he was empty. Thoughtless.
What Arendt saw was that great evil doesn’t always come from hatred.
Sometimes, it comes from not thinking.
From following orders. From a kind of moral autopilot that lets us stop feeling, stop questioning, and start obeying.
And when I catch myself scrolling past another photo of a bombed-out school, I start to wonder if I’m on that same road. Not in scale, of course. But in spirit.
When the world is too much, we shut down
We’re not Nazis. We’re not executing commands in genocidal systems. But we are inundated — with crisis, with cruelty, with catastrophe.
And sometimes, just to get through the day, we go cold.
It makes sense. Indifference is a kind of armor.
If you felt the full weight of every death, every injustice, every child’s body pulled from the rubble — how would you sleep?
But the risk is that in numbing ourselves to survive, we begin to stop seeing.
We stop thinking.
We become, in Arendt’s words, “unable to make up our minds to be good or evil.”
We just… drift.
So what now?
I’m not going to end this with a list of five things you can do to stay engaged.
That’s not what this is. I’m just trying to stay human.
Trying to notice the moment I begin to look away.
Trying not to congratulate myself for caring, or beat myself up for being tired.
But mostly: trying not to let the numbness win.
Sometimes that means reading the whole article instead of skimming the headline.
Sometimes it means sitting with a story that breaks your heart.
Sometimes it means doing absolutely nothing — but noticing that you felt something anyway.
That flicker matters.
It might even be the last defense we have.
A final thought
Arendt never told us to be heroes. She didn’t believe in sainthood.
What she wanted was something more modest, and maybe harder: to think.
To remain alert to the world, even when it hurts.
To refuse, in whatever way we can, the seduction of looking away.
I don’t have an answer.
But I know this:
If indifference is the real enemy, then noticing it — refusing to ignore it — might be the first act of resistance. ■