Comfortably and Collectively Numb: Why Gen Z feels nothing anymore?

(The Uttam Hindu): We often describe the present as “unprecedented” times. It’s a word that has become code for chaos. A subtle way to frame pandemics, wars, political upheavals, and societal fractures as uniquely overwhelming moments in history.

But perhaps that framing is misleading.

We are not living in unprecedented times.

We are living in “overexposed” times.

Never before has humanity been so consistently, intimately, and relentlessly connected to the sufferings of the world. A tragedy in one corner of the globe is no longer distant; it arrives instantly, unfiltered, and repeated, on our phones, across platforms, embedded into our daily routines. The sheer volume of human loss we are exposed to today may not necessarily be greater than in the past but our proximity to it has magnified it exponentially.

A global pandemic unfolds in real time. Wars are live-streamed. Terror attacks are dissected within minutes. Institutional scandals break and evolve in public view. Each event demands attention, reaction, and emotional investment, and before we can process one, another takes its place.

And somewhere along the way, something shifts.

The headlines stop landing with the same force.

The numbers begin to replace names.

The grief becomes distant, almost abstract.

This is not apathy in its purest form. It is something more complex, more human, and perhaps more concerning: adaptation.

Most of us have adapted to tragedies being part of our routine because caring deeply, continuously, and without pause seems unsustainable.

And even more concerning is how we are coping with these tragedies. We adjust and accommodate.

We scroll, we consume. We distract. We avoid.

We tell ourselves that staying informed is a responsibility, and it is. That man is a social animal and awareness is essential in this global village of the world that we live in. But what we rarely acknowledge is the emotional cost of this constant awareness.

Information today does not arrive with built-in space for reflection. There is no time to truly feel or empathise with any of it. No natural pause, no collective moment to grieve, no closure. There is only continuity, an endless stream where one crisis seamlessly replaces another like things are only going wrong in the world. And the consequence of constantly being bombarded with sufferings is ironically not heightened empathy. It is, paradoxically, a quiet erosion of it.

The result is a collective numbness.

Not joy. Not sorrow. Just a steady, muted hum of existence.

In this state, we function. We perform normalcy. But beneath that surface lies a subtle detachment. A buffering of emotional response that allows us to keep going without being overwhelmed.

Majority of gen Z have, in many ways, become fluent in deflection.

We binge-watch to avoid thinking.

We overwork to avoid feeling.

We endlessly refresh our feeds to avoid sitting with ourselves.

Distraction is no longer an occasional escape; it has become a default coping mechanism. A STATE OF BEING (or rather just existing). Ironically, in trying to protect ourselves from discomfort, we risk distancing ourselves from the very core of our humanity: the ability to feel deeply, to empathise, to connect (and eventually are faced with the same discomfort we wanted to avoid in the first place)

There is a line I read recently which led to this eureka moment. It captures this paradox with unsettling clarity:

"Yeh jo guzar raha hai, yeh waqt nahi — zindagi hai."

What is passing us by is not merely time. It is life itself.

And it raises an uncomfortable question:

When did we start avoiding life in the name of coping with it?

I realised I do it and I saw my friends do it and hence I understand that this avoidance is rarely conscious. It does not announce itself as withdrawal. It disguises itself as productivity, as staying informed, as harmless distraction. But its effects are gradual and almost unnoticeable. Over time, numbness becomes a state of being.

What needs to be understood is that numbness is not resilience but rather exhaustion in disguise.

To stay humane in this reality requires the willingness to experience discomfort, to process it, and to move through it so that we don’t lose the ability to do it at all. Numbness bypasses this process entirely and allows us to function, but lose the emotional depth we as humans possess.

The only quality that distinguishes us from other species including AI bots that act as dress up humans is our EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE. And this state of numbness is constantly taking that away from us. Reducing us to second class robots instead of fully functioning humans.

This is not an argument against awareness, nor is it a call to disengage from the realities of the world. Ignorance is not a sustainable solution. But neither is constant, unfiltered exposure with absolutely no reflection at all.

The challenge of our time is not simply surviving the chaos around us. It is maintaining emotional presence within it.

To remain human in an age that constantly demands our attention but rarely allows us to process what we are witnessing. (No wonder why 90% of us have ADHD)

This numbness does not require dramatic changes but something far quieter.

Reflection.

A pause before the next scroll.

A moment of stillness before distraction takes over. A willingness to sit with discomfort, even when it hurts or rather especially when it hurts (even if briefly).

To acknowledge a feeling instead of immediately suppressing it. To not bottle up something (to come back to later) to feel for the future.

To recognise that empathy, even when it hurts, is not a weakness but a vital human capacity.

Because if we lose the ability to feel to truly, actually and absolutely feel, we risk losing the very essence of what binds us to one another.

And perhaps the path back is not complicated. Perhaps it is as simple, and yet ironically as difficult, as this:

Pause.

Feel.

Stay.