The Endless War on Our Attention

Are we the Veterans of a War We Never Signed Up For?

There was a time when trauma had a border.

Think of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy or fought in the jungles of Vietnam. They witnessed unimaginable horror, but they did so within the confines of a conflict. When they came home, they left the battlefield behind. They were embraced by communities, cared for by families, and given the space, however challenging, to heal in a world that was, for the most part, peaceful. The violence was there. The safety was here.

Our modern experience of trauma has inverted this completely. We are the veterans of a war without borders, without end, and without a uniform.

The pandemic was our first collective draft into this conflict. A free-floating anxiety seeped into every home. Our solution, our command centre, was the black mirror in our hands. We stared into our mobile phones, seeking connection and information, and we got hooked on a drip-feed of social media input.

The pandemic anxiety may have subsided, but the addiction remains. And the media systems and governments that learned to command our attention during that crisis now know they can crank up the anxiety at the flick of a switch.

Over the past 72 hours, my feed, and likely yours, has been a grotesque gallery of human suffering. A young woman stabbed on a train. A man shot in the throat. These videos are not hidden; they are reposted countless times across countless platforms, wrapped in the hollow justification of "awareness."

But let’s be honest. This isn’t about awareness. It’s about addiction.

We are not merely intrigued by the graphic violence. We are intrigued by our own reaction to it. We are performing our outrage, our grief, our horror for an audience. We have become voyeurs of our own empathy, and it is sickening. Yet, we can’t help it. The pull is stronger than any drug because it is socially sanctioned. A heroin addict at least has the shame of their addiction. We have the illusion of virtue, of being "informed."

We are living in a world where no one has peace. Our minds are perpetually mobilised, our nervous systems constantly on high alert by a 24-hour stream of curated suffering from every corner of the globe. There is no front line, because the front line is everywhere. There is no home to return to, because the battlefield is in our pockets.

And in this state of constant, low-grade traumatic stress, what happens? We look for someone to blame. The anxiety must be directed somewhere,at a political party, a group of people, an ideology. The digital stream fractures us, and then we turn on each other, desperate to pin our diffuse dread on a tangible enemy.

We must recognise this for what it is: an endless war on our attention, our peace, and our capacity for genuine empathy.

The first step to building a new peace is to lay down our weapons. To put down the phone. To consciously, deliberately, choose to not bear witness to every horror the algorithm serves us. To understand that being truly informed is not about consuming every atrocity, but about understanding the context behind one.

True healing begins not with more content, but with the courage to be disconnected. To stare not into a screen, but into the eyes of someone in front of you. To build a sanctuary of quiet in a world that has declared war on silence.

Our minds were not built for this endless stream. It’s time to retreat, to give ourselves the care those postwar veterans were offered. It’s time to come home.