Imaginary Fires: How the Internet Made Us Comfortable Enough to Forget Ourselves

The network made every crisis visible, every grievance marketable and every moment intolerably empty.

The internet did not eliminate real suffering. War, poverty, abuse, loneliness and political repression remain brutally material. What it changed was our relationship to suffering. It placed every disaster within reach of the same thumb we use to order dinner, watch comedy and inspect strangers. The result is a strange psychological condition: unprecedented exposure combined with almost no corresponding power.

We know too much to feel innocent and too little to act intelligently.

A person once encountered problems at human scale: a sick relative, a dangerous employer, an unjust local law, a neighbour in need. These demands were incomplete and unfair, but they usually contained some possibility of action. The network replaced that scale with a permanent global emergency. Every famine, bombing, scandal, insult, celebrity collapse and ideological dispute arrives in the same feed, stripped of distance and competing for the same exhausted nervous system.

The internet’s deepest distortion is false proximity. Visibility feels like responsibility; reaction feels like action; emotional exhaustion feels like moral seriousness. We spend our days fighting imaginary fires while the unglamorous parts of our actual lives quietly burn.

The Industrialisation of Urgency

Social-media companies do not need users to be informed, fulfilled or even persuaded. They need them activated.

Calm understanding is commercially weak. It produces few comments and little compulsion to refresh. Anger, fear, envy and tribal recognition travel faster because they produce immediate behaviour. The ranking system does not ask whether a post is true, proportionate or useful. It asks whether people stopped scrolling.

A 2021 Science Advances study examining millions of posts, alongside controlled experiments, found that social rewards such as likes and shares taught users to express more moral outrage over time. The platform did not invent their convictions; it trained the manner in which those convictions were performed.

Public morality changes when it is measured. A private act of patience, forgiveness or material assistance may produce no visible signal. A denunciation produces a number. The deed disappears while its advertisement thrives.

Online outrage is not necessarily false. Much of it responds to genuine injustice. Its corruption lies in the conversion of justice into social currency. The performance of concern becomes easier to display than the disciplines concern should require: learning, organising, donating, voting, caring for someone difficult or accepting personal cost.

A slogan can be posted in seconds. Character remains inconveniently slow.

Boredom Became a Market

The internet promised to abolish boredom. Instead, it made boredom intolerable.

Boredom was once an interval between activities. It could produce restlessness, but also reflection, fantasy, observation and the first movement towards deliberate action. The smartphone converted that interval into commercial inventory. Every queue, train ride, meal and moment before sleep became an opportunity to deliver advertising.

A systematic review of problematic technology use found consistent associations between boredom proneness and compulsive smartphone, social-media and internet use. The direction is not simple: bored people reach for devices, while habitual stimulation appears to leave ordinary life feeling increasingly insufficient. The cure strengthens the condition it relieves.

This is the quiet achievement of the attention economy. It did not make life more interesting. It lowered our tolerance for anything that does not become interesting immediately.

Once every empty moment can be filled, silence begins to feel like deprivation. Work requiring sustained attention feels unusually heavy. Conversation feels slow. Books appear demanding. Relationships become frustrating because another person cannot be paused, accelerated or replaced with a more stimulating recommendation.

The overstimulated mind is not necessarily engaged. Often it is merely fleeing the moment in front of it.

Concern Without Agency

Doomscrolling is what happens when vigilance loses its object.

Human beings evolved to treat threatening information as a prompt: detect the danger, decide what it means and act. Online, the cycle rarely closes. The threat remains visible but geographically distant, structurally complex or entirely beyond individual control. The body receives the alarm without the relief of action.

A 30-day diary study of 429 participants found bidirectional relationships between repeated crisis-news exposure and distress: anxious people sought more news, while continued exposure predicted greater anxiety, depression and crisis-related distress. Doomscrolling is not simply curiosity. It is a feedback loop in which fear demands information and information supplies more fear.

The mistake is to confuse awareness with unlimited exposure. A person does not become more useful by absorbing every available horror. Beyond a certain point, information ceases to orient and begins to incapacitate.

The result is a population that feels simultaneously guilty and powerless. We are invited to maintain opinions about everything while possessing expertise in almost nothing. Each day brings new instructions about whom to condemn, defend, mourn, boycott or fear. Yesterday’s emergency vanishes before any understanding can form.

A hundred alarms with no available response do not produce an informed citizen. They produce a trapped spectator.

The Overton Window Moves Through Exhaustion

The Overton window describes the range of ideas politicians can publicly support without placing themselves outside accepted opinion. It is often presented as a scale along which an idea moves from unthinkable to radical, acceptable, sensible, popular and finally policy.

The model is usually applied to persuasion: activists, institutions and political leaders repeat an argument until the formerly impossible becomes discussable. The attention economy has introduced a darker route. An idea or condition can become normal without ever becoming persuasive. The public simply becomes accustomed to seeing it.

The sequence is no longer merely unthinkable, radical, acceptable. It is unthinkable, spectacular, repetitive, debatable, administrative, ordinary.

No one has to convince people that cruelty is good. They need only make cruelty familiar, surround it with euphemism and demonstrate that opposition changes nothing. Repetition lowers the emotional voltage. Bureaucratic language takes over. Atrocity becomes “security policy”, mass deprivation becomes “operational pressure”, institutional corruption becomes “a failure of procedure”. What should rupture political life is absorbed into its daily vocabulary.

The window moves because the public has been persuaded. It also moves because the public is tired.

Epstein and the Diffusion of Outrage

The video essay Why the Epstein Files Didn’t Start a Revolution, by uncivilized, identifies four forces behind this exhaustion: desensitisation, psychological saturation, learned helplessness and media complicity. Its essential question is not why the Epstein revelations produced no anger. The anger plainly exists. The question is why exposure on such a scale failed to become sustained political consequence.

Epstein’s case did not remain hidden because evidence never emerged. It became a recurring media property: disclosed, consumed, memed, factionalised and returned to storage until the next release cycle.

In 2007, federal prosecutors entered a non-prosecution agreement that allowed Epstein to resolve the investigation through comparatively limited state charges. A later Justice Department review concluded that former US Attorney Alexander Acosta had exercised poor judgment and that victims were not treated with the forthrightness and sensitivity expected by the department. Epstein was federally charged with sex trafficking minors in 2019 but died before trial. Ghislaine Maxwell was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 20 years.

That constitutes some accountability, but it does not answer the larger question of how abuse operated for years around wealth, access and institutional deference. Nor does the appearance of a person’s name in a contact book, flight log or released document establish criminal conduct. Evidence requires distinctions; the internet prefers insinuation.

This is how legitimate suspicion is neutralised. Information arrives mixed with partisan fantasy, recycled claims and indiscriminate accusation until careful inquiry becomes almost impossible. One side turns the case into entertainment; another into proof of every pre-existing theory. The institutional question—who knew, who enabled, who declined to act and why—dissolves inside a spectacle of names.

The scandal remains visible while its structure disappears.

Power once relied on secrecy. It increasingly survives through exposure without resolution.

Gaza and the Normalisation of the Unthinkable

The genocide in Gaza raises this problem at a vastly greater human and political scale. Epstein and Gaza are not equivalent cases. One concerns organised sexual abuse and elite impunity; the other concerns the destruction of a population under military occupation. Their connection lies in the public’s experience of evidence: revelation after revelation, image after image, followed by astonishingly little interruption to the machinery producing the harm.

Palestinians have documented their own destruction in real time. Bombed homes, injured children, destroyed hospitals, mass displacement, starvation and grieving families have circulated beside advertisements, comedy clips and lifestyle content. The evidence was not absent. It was abundant beyond comprehension.

In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, finding four of the five genocidal acts defined by the Genocide Convention and the specific intent required by that law. Israel rejects the allegation and maintains that it has been conducting a war against Hamas.

The International Court of Justice has not yet issued its final judgment on the merits of South Africa’s genocide case. It has, however, imposed binding provisional measures intended to protect Palestinian rights under the Genocide Convention. The International Criminal Court separately issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, finding reasonable grounds to believe they bore responsibility for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare, murder and persecution.

Hamas’s killing of civilians and taking of hostages on 7 October 2023 were atrocities. They do not dissolve the distinction between combatants and civilians, suspend international law or make an entire population disposable.

The Overton window moves when propositions once considered morally impossible are converted into ordinary political options: withholding food from civilians, destroying the conditions required for communal life, forcing mass displacement or treating unlimited civilian death as the regrettable but acceptable cost of military policy. Each proposition becomes easier to discuss after the public has already watched some version of it happen.

This is normalisation by accomplished fact. Debate begins only after the unthinkable has been implemented.

The network can show people a child pulled from rubble and, seconds later, offer them a recipe. That juxtaposition does not merely trivialise the image. Repeated thousands of times, it trains the nervous system to receive atrocity without allowing atrocity to interrupt anything.

The horror remains recognised as horror. It simply becomes part of the weather.

Identity as a Receipt

The internet has helped people discover language for experiences they once endured alone. Marginalised people can find community, compare knowledge and organise across borders. Any serious criticism of online identity must begin there.

But the same machinery can convert identity into a shortcut around self-knowledge.

Platforms encourage us to explain ourselves through public categories because categories are legible, searchable and marketable. A label can provide recognition, but it can also become a substitute for the harder work of developing a coherent life. Affiliation offers an instant moral location: display the correct symbols, repeat the accepted phrases and acquire the appearance of belonging.

The corruption begins when identity stops describing experience and starts functioning as a receipt for virtue.

This does not mean identities are imaginary or solidarity insincere. It means platforms reward visible declarations more reliably than the obligations that should follow them. Allyship becomes branding. Trauma becomes authority. Vulnerability becomes content. Political language designed to describe structural injustice is recruited into interpersonal status contests.

The audience rewards disclosure, conflict and moral certainty. Ambivalence performs badly. A culture that turns every self into a public-relations department should not be surprised when sincerity becomes difficult to recognise.

When Discomfort Became Danger

The digital world has also blurred the distinction between discomfort and harm.

Some of this shift corrected genuine cruelty. Institutions once dismissed trauma, bullying and discrimination as weakness. Greater psychological literacy allowed people to name experiences that had been deliberately minimised.

But therapeutic language escaped the clinic and became a general vocabulary of disagreement. Ordinary conflict became “abuse”; unpleasant people became “narcissists”; disagreement became “invalidation”; boundaries became demands that other people manage one’s internal state. Clinical terms acquired moral force while losing clinical precision.

A meta-analysis of trigger warnings, covering 86 effect sizes across nine articles, found that warnings produced no meaningful reduction in distress after encountering difficult material. They modestly increased anticipatory anxiety and did not consistently encourage avoidance. Content descriptions may still serve consent or accessibility, but the evidence does not support treating warnings as psychological protection.

Resilience does not mean enjoying distress or enduring mistreatment. It means retaining the capacity to experience discomfort without interpreting it as proof of injury. A society that cannot distinguish pain, offence, fear and danger will be governed by whoever can manipulate those words most effectively.

The Algorithm Is Not an Omnipotent Villain

Blaming “the algorithm” for every social pathology is itself comforting. It turns a complicated relationship between technology, institutions and human appetite into another imaginary fire with a single villain.

Algorithms shape what becomes visible, but users also teach algorithms what to reward. The machine amplifies human preferences; those amplified preferences then train human behaviour. Responsibility passes around the loop until everyone can plausibly deny possessing it.

The evidence is more complicated than the familiar story about automatic radicalisation. A large 2023 Facebook experiment reduced participants’ exposure to like-minded sources by roughly one-third. It changed what they saw and reduced their exposure to incivility and repeat misinformation sources, but produced no measurable change across eight registered political-attitude measures.

Platforms are not interchangeable. A 2026 randomised experiment on X found that activating its algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted some policy and current-affairs opinions in a conservative direction. It did not measurably change affective polarisation or declared partisanship.

Algorithms neither control us completely nor leave us untouched. Their effects depend on the platform, its ownership, its incentives and what it has been designed to promote. They are powerful editors without editorial responsibility: deciding what millions encounter while claiming merely to reflect what those millions wanted.

The system is neither separate from us nor identical to us. It is human weakness engineered for scale.

Connection Without Community

Online friendships are real. For disabled, isolated, geographically dispersed and culturally marginalised people, they can be indispensable.

But connection is not automatically community.

A relationship is measured not only by emotional intensity but by the obligations it can carry. Who notices when you stop leaving the house? Who helps you move, brings food when you are sick, tolerates your unedited presence or tells you when you are becoming unbearable? Digital intimacy can support those bonds, but it cannot always bear their physical weight.

The World Health Organization reported in 2025 that roughly one in six people globally experiences loneliness, with especially high rates among young people and in lower-income countries. The most connected technological era has not solved social disconnection because communication volume is not the same as belonging.

Belonging involves repetition, inconvenience, shared place and mutual dependence. Platforms offer contact without many of those burdens. That is partly their gift. It is also why they can leave us surrounded yet unheld.

Document Everything, Change Nothing

The internet gave ordinary people extraordinary powers of documentation. Police violence, sexual abuse, war crimes and institutional corruption can now be recorded and distributed before authorities have time to bury them.

Yet documentation is not accountability.

The same feed that delivers evidence of an atrocity delivers a dance, advertisement, joke and celebrity dispute seconds later. The interface gives them the same dimensions, the same gestures and nearly the same emotional lifespan. Everything becomes content, including evidence that should interrupt ordinary life.

Authoritarian power does not always require citizens to know nothing. It may be enough that they know everything briefly. Saturation can neutralise truth as effectively as censorship. When each revelation is displaced by the next, exposure stops producing consequence. Scandal becomes atmosphere.

The easiest population to govern is not necessarily the ignorant one. It may be the population that is permanently alarmed, privately exhausted and convinced that posting constitutes resistance.

Power no longer needs to hide every crime if it can make exposure feel repetitive.

The Discipline of Distance

The answer is not to abandon the internet. The task is to restore proportion between what we witness and what we can meaningfully carry.

The Japanese principle hara hachi bu advises eating until one is mostly full rather than completely stuffed. Digital life needs a similar stopping rule: leave before clarity becomes compulsion. The moment to stop scrolling is not when nothing remains to consume. Nothing will ever remain. The moment is when consumption ceases to serve a chosen purpose.

Replace feeds with deliberate visits, notifications with scheduled attention and ambient awareness with bounded responsibility. Choose a few reliable sources rather than inhaling the entire information environment. Choose political and communal problems on which you can act. Let concern alter your calendar, spending, relationships or conduct; otherwise admit that it remains sensation.

This is not an argument for looking away from Gaza, elite abuse or any other real injustice. It is an argument for refusing the form of attention that makes looking indistinguishable from doing nothing. Sustained attention, organised pressure, material support and political risk are different from the temporary possession of the correct emotion.

Protect boredom. Keep portions of the day unfilled. Allow a question to remain unanswered long enough for your own mind to approach it. Preserve friendships that require voice, place, patience and inconvenience. Use the network to arrange life rather than as a substitute for living it.

Kahlil Gibran wrote, “Let there be spaces in your togetherness.” The same principle applies to technology. Held too far away, it cannot help us. Held too close, it occupies the space from which judgment should emerge.

A real problem places a demand on conduct. An imaginary fire asks only for reaction.

The internet will continue supplying both. Our remaining freedom lies in learning the difference—and refusing to let repetition move the unthinkable into the ordinary.