I don’t know exactly when it happened.
I couldn’t tell you the day, the hour, or the screen that made me notice. I don’t believe a single moment changed everything.
But somewhere along the way, something shifted.
Something in the way we see one another. Something in the way we respond to another person’s suffering. Something in what we have learned to laugh at, what we are willing to watch, and what no longer seems to trouble us.
And I find myself wondering what we’ve lost.
I scroll, and I see it.
I turn on the television, and I hear it.
Families turned into punchlines. Betrayal repackaged as entertainment. Someone’s private humiliation made public, shared thousands of times before anyone stops to consider the person at the center of it.
A marriage falls apart, and we watch the arguments unfold in high definition. A man breaks down in tears, and we ask whether his pain is genuine. A woman reaches the lowest point of her life, and strangers gather to critique the way she handles it.
Somewhere, someone is having the worst day of their life.
And somewhere else, someone is laughing.
We have become curators of collapse.
I understand that entertainment has always reflected the darker parts of human nature. Conflict makes stories compelling. Betrayal, revenge, jealousy, and violence have occupied our stages and filled our books for centuries.
I am not suggesting that every difficult story is harmful or that art should only show us the beautiful parts of being human.
Some stories must be told precisely because they hurt.
History demands that much of us.
We need to witness some things because forgetting them would be another injustice. Some images expose cruelty, some stories preserve memory, and some accounts of suffering force us to acknowledge what others would prefer to hide.
But there is a difference between witnessing someone’s pain to understand it and watching someone’s pain because we enjoy the spectacle.
I wonder whether we are beginning to forget that difference.
We have learned to consume tragedy in small, convenient portions.
A few seconds of outrage. A few minutes of disbelief. A comment, a reaction, a share.
Then we move on.
The next video begins before we’ve had time to consider the last one.
Someone dies, and the footage circulates.
Someone is assaulted, and the argument becomes whether the recording is real.
Someone humiliates a stranger in a grocery store, and millions of people are invited to watch.
Sometimes those recordings serve a necessary purpose. They document wrongdoing. They challenge official accounts. They preserve evidence that might otherwise disappear.
I understand the importance of that. I believe bearing witness is necessary.
But I also wonder what happens when the camera stops witnessing and becomes part of the performance.
When the person recording cares less about helping than about capturing the moment.
When the audience cares more about the spectacle than the suffering.
When another human being’s pain becomes an opportunity for attention.
And when attention becomes its own kind of currency.
Reality television has turned conflict into an industry. Social media has given humiliation an audience that never sleeps. Arguments become episodes. Betrayals become storylines. Families unravel while strangers take sides, choose favorites, and wait for the next confrontation.
We watch people deceive one another, abandon responsibilities, manipulate relationships, and publicly destroy what once existed between them.
And sometimes we reward the person who causes the most damage.
Not because they are right.
Not because they have something meaningful to teach us.
But because they are entertaining.
I wonder what that teaches us.
Especially the young people watching, still learning what it means to love, to trust, to disagree, to forgive, and to live alongside others.
What happens when cruelty begins to look like confidence?
When manipulation is mistaken for intelligence?
When loyalty becomes something to ridicule and kindness is treated as weakness?
I don’t believe a television program or a video game can explain everything wrong with society. Human behavior is far too complicated for that.
But I do believe the stories we tell, the behavior we celebrate, and the things we repeatedly reward can influence what we come to accept.
And I worry about what we are learning to accept.
An old image keeps returning.
The Roman Colosseum.
I think about the crowds gathering to witness violence. About the excitement of the spectacle. About human suffering transformed into public entertainment.
The Romans understood something about crowds.
They understood that violence could become ceremony. That suffering could become an attraction. That the distance between spectator and victim could make cruelty easier to tolerate.
Of course, Rome was more complicated than its arenas. Its history cannot be reduced to the entertainment its people enjoyed, just as our own society can’t be explained by what appears on our screens.
But the image stays with me.
Thousands of people gathered to watch someone else struggle to survive.
And I wonder how different we really are when we measure the distance between ourselves and another person’s suffering by a screen rather than the walls of an arena.
We are in the Coliseum again.
But this time, we brought the lions.
We are the lions.
Not because every person who watches is cruel. Not because curiosity makes someone heartless.
But because, in some moments, our attention helps keep the spectacle alive.
We share what shocks us.
We reward what angers us.
We return to what we claim to despise.
Somewhere along the way, the people producing these spectacles learn that the more outrageous the behavior, the larger the audience.
The greater the audience, the greater the profit.
Cruelty becomes a business model.
Outrage becomes advertising.
And suffering becomes content.
Perhaps what troubles me most is how ordinary it can all begin to feel.
A few years ago, something might have stopped us in our tracks. We might have talked about it for days, struggling to understand what had happened.
Now, the next terrible thing arrives before we’ve finished thinking about the first.
We are asked to feel everything at once and somehow continue our ordinary lives.
I sometimes wonder whether what looks like indifference is actually exhaustion.
Whether we have been exposed to so much suffering, presented so quickly and so relentlessly, that we struggle to know what to do with it.
Perhaps some people have stopped reacting because they no longer care.
Perhaps others have stopped because caring without knowing how to help has become unbearable.
I suspect it’s both.
And that troubles me, too.
Because I don’t want to become someone who can look at another person’s suffering and feel nothing.
I don’t want the terrible things I have witnessed to make me less capable of tenderness.
I don’t want to mistake cynicism for wisdom.
Or cruelty for honesty.
Or humiliation for entertainment.
I am not moralizing.
I’m mourning.
And I want to be careful about what I mean by that.
I am not mourning some perfect past. I know enough history to understand that such a place never existed.
Human beings have always been capable of extraordinary cruelty. We have built institutions around it, justified it with laws, defended it through religion, and disguised it as tradition.
People have gathered to witness public executions. They have celebrated strangers’ suffering. They have turned punishment into theater and humiliation into a public ritual.
We did not invent these things with smartphones.
And I would never argue that previous generations possessed some special innocence that we have somehow abandoned.
But I am mourning something.
Maybe it is the expectation that cruelty ought to trouble us.
That another person’s humiliation should make us uncomfortable.
That someone’s tears should awaken something more human than curiosity.
That seeing another person brought low should not automatically make us feel taller.
I miss the idea that there are some things we should refuse to find funny.
Not because laughter is wrong.
I love laughter. I believe it can carry people through terrible circumstances. Sometimes it is the only relief available when life becomes difficult.
I remember the kind of laughter that fills a room and makes everybody feel welcome. The kind that travels across a family table. The kind that comes from knowing someone well enough to laugh together without anyone becoming the victim.
That laughter has a different sound.
It brings people closer.
What troubles me is the laughter that requires someone else’s destruction.
The kind that demands a loser before anyone can celebrate a winner.
The kind that mistakes embarrassment for justice and humiliation for accountability.
I wonder how often we confuse the two.
And I wonder what it costs us.
Because I believe what we practice becomes easier.
Practice patience, and perhaps we become more patient.
Practice compassion, and perhaps we become more willing to recognize another person’s pain.
But practice ridicule often enough, and I wonder whether it begins to feel natural.
Whether we start carrying it beyond the screen.
Into our conversations.
Our relationships.
Our families.
The way we speak about people we have never met.
The way we respond when someone makes a mistake.
How we treat a stranger whose worst moment suddenly becomes public.
It is easy to forget that the people we watch are not characters simply because we encounter them through a screen.
They have families.
They have ordinary mornings and sleepless nights.
They have people who love them, people who worry about them, people who will still be living with the consequences long after the audience has moved on.
The video ends.
The comments stop.
The algorithm finds something new.
But the person remains.
And whatever happened to them remains, too.
I think that is what I wish we would remember.
A human being is on the other side of our entertainment.
Someone whose life continues after we have finished watching.
Someone who may never know the people who laughed at them, but who must still live with what was done.
Someone who deserves more than our passing attention.
So what do we do?
I don’t pretend to have an answer large enough to repair what troubles me.
I cannot change the entire entertainment industry. I cannot make every person who watches a humiliating video recognize the humanity of the person in it.
And I certainly cannot pretend that I have never been drawn into a spectacle myself.
I have watched things that angered me. I have followed stories longer than I needed to. I have felt the pull of wanting to know what happened next.
That, too, is part of what makes this uncomfortable.
It is easy to criticize the crowd while forgetting that sometimes we are standing in it.
But I believe we can make smaller choices.
We can decide that someone else’s humiliation does not need our participation.
We can refuse to share a recording simply because it is shocking.
We can ask whether watching serves any purpose beyond satisfying our curiosity.
We can remember that documenting injustice and enjoying suffering are not the same thing.
We can teach children that popularity is not character, that attention is not affection, and that cruelty does not become admirable simply because people applaud it.
We can learn to disagree without needing to destroy one another.
And perhaps we can begin paying closer attention to the kind of laughter we invite into our lives.
The laughter that welcomes.
The laughter that heals.
The laughter that reminds us we belong to one another.
I still believe something decent lives within us.
I see it when strangers help someone who has fallen. When neighbors bring Food to a family in trouble. When people offer kindness without recording it, without announcing it, without expecting anything in return.
Those moments rarely get the attention a public scandal does.
But they happen.
Every day.
And perhaps that is where hope begins.
Not in pretending the world has suddenly become cruel, or imagining that we can return to an age when people were kinder.
But in recognizing that we still choose what we encourage, what we reward, and what we allow ourselves to become.
I began by wondering what we had lost.
Maybe the better question is what we are willing to preserve.
Our capacity to care.
Our willingness to look at another person and recognize something of ourselves.
Our understanding that suffering isn’t automatically entertainment, and that another person’s dignity shouldn’t depend on whether the crowd finds them amusing.
I don’t know whether we can change the appetite for spectacle.
But I know we can question our own.
Perhaps the first act of compassion is refusing to cheer.
Perhaps we cannot silence the lions.
But we can decide whether they hear our applause.
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