When American conservative figurehead Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an outdoor debate in Utah, U.S., earlier in September, the internet exploded. From front-page news articles to Instagram stories, we just couldn’t get away from it. Everyone seemed to have their own thinkpiece to write about the topic from mainstream political activists to our former high school classmates. Opinions crawled out of the woodwork like ants, flooding the media and our collective consciousness.
On the same day that the news broke about Kirk’s shooting, “Block Everything” protests in France brought almost 300 arrests by deployed military police in just a few hours. Simultaneously, a school shooting took place in Colorado, U.S., injuring two students before the 16-year-old gunman turned the revolver on himself. Meanwhile in Nepal, police opened fire on civilian protestors in Kathmandu, killing 30 and wounding thousands. Still on September 10, 41 people, including 12 aid seekers, were killed in Gaza by bombings carried out by the Israeli military.
With tragedies making up so many of the headlines and images we are confronted with every day, it’s hard not to feel like the world is ending right before our eyes. This “distant suffering” – a term now being used to describe the sympathetic anguish and dejection one can feel at witnessing a tragedy from afar – can be crushing. Proliferated in recent years through social media and globalized networks of information-sharing, distant suffering has become widespread and deeply felt. This phenomenon is coupled with rising disillusionment among young people with state institutions worldwide, who are frustrated that so many of our governments remain complicit in the suffering that persists across the globe. A survey of 10,000 youth (ages 16-25) respondents from various countries found that 65 per cent of participants believed that their governments were “failing young people.” Amidst a declining job market and multiple global crises, university students across the board are reporting higher instances of depression or depressive symptoms than ever before, with 38 per cent in the United States and 46 per cent in Canada over the past two years.
Faced with this inescapable tumult, many young people find themselves trying to shut out the world. The problem of youth disengagement in social and political action is becoming increasingly relevant; young adults are slipping into nihilist anti-intellectualism in order to cope with and avoid the peripheral stress of simply being alive in such pressing times. But our generation’s common “it’s not that deep” mentality is beginning to hinder us from probing further into and challenging the dominant systems and narratives in our world. While nihilism might momentarily feel liberating, even Nietzsche foresaw it to have the potential to precipitate the greatest crisis known to man, characterised by the erosion of values and perpetual purposelessness.
So, what can we do? When the foundations of the world and our futures feel like they’re crumbling in front of us, is there anything we can do other than sit still and watch? You might catch yourself thinking: “It’s not like I can change the world, so why even bother trying? Does it even matter?”
As today’s youths prepare to inherit the world we live in, doubting the ability of our individual actions to shape the future has the dangerous potential of detracting from our momentum. The Asia Pacific Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy published a paper on youth non-engagement and spiritual emptiness which puts this pitfall into perspective: “Hope is action-oriented; despair is the failure to take action.” When we lose faith in ourselves to produce even the smallest of changes, we will be forced to accept the status quo. In order to keep pushing for the progress we need, we have to avoid slipping from nihilism into despondency and find a way to make our perspectives actionable. We need something more productive, something that spurs us to mobilize and act in our own ways. This involves making our worlds smaller. That doesn’t mean detaching ourselves from reality, but pulling our focus from the global impact our individual actions and attitudes often cannot have. Instead we must realize the potential they can have to effect change in our communities, which are just as important.
The thought of making waves across the world can be inspiring, but constantly thinking on such a large scale can often be more paralyzing than motivational. By taking action in our own lives, we can relieve ourselves from the impossible task of trying to counteract forces that are out of our control by putting effort into changing our worlds. Action doesn’t always have to be made with grand gestures: sometimes, it can just mean showing up to support the people and causes we care about.
In addition to taking action, we must remember that while we can be bound by distant suffering, we can also use our sympathy to connect with others through systems of mutual aid and comfort. Rather than focusing on our own internal upset, it often helps to reach out to others and find solace in remembering that we are not as alone as we might feel. Listening to other people’s stories of love and loss, joy and sadness, can help us cultivate empathy in our increasingly divided world. Moreover, while humour has always been a way of making sense of our experiences in particularly dark times, constantly reducing our pain into quips and one-liners can eventually erode our sensitivity. Sometimes, it really is that deep, and that’s okay.
Yes, most days now do feel like an endless onslaught of bad news and tragedy, ever present on our screens and all around us. But the good news is that we hold the power to enact change. Humans have always been a species capable of adapting, and while the world might feel like it’s ending, that also must mean it hasn’t ended yet.