Two places. Two tragedies.
Brown University. Bondi Beach.
Different countries. Different contexts. Same ending.
A brief moment of shock. A rush of posts. Carefully worded grief. “Thoughts and prayers.” “This should never happen.” A familiar choreography of sorrow and outrage, calibrated just enough to signal that we are good, caring people.
And then, quietly, we move on.
I did too.
I read the headlines. I felt the heaviness settle, briefly. I shook my head. I thought about sharing a post. And then I returned to my day—meetings, messages, deadlines, plans for the holidays.
Not because I don’t care.
But because caring fully would cost more than I was prepared to give.
That’s the part we rarely admit.
We spend a lot of time criticizing performative empathy, and much of that criticism is deserved. But performance isn’t the real problem. It’s the symptom. The deeper failure is that we’ve replaced moral formation with moral signaling. We’ve become fluent in expressing grief while steadily losing the capacity to be changed by it.
So we scroll. We react. We forget.
Not out of cruelty. Out of conditioning.
What unsettles me isn’t that tragedy fades from the feed. It’s how quickly it fades from the soul. We have learned how to metabolize horror efficiently. Absorb. Acknowledge. Discard. Return to normal.
I am not numb because I am indifferent.
I am numb because this is how I’ve learned to survive a world that never stops demanding my attention.
And if I’m honest, that survival strategy doesn’t feel very human.
We live in an age of unprecedented awareness and astonishing detachment. We know more about suffering than any generation before us, yet feel strangely less responsible for what we know. Awareness has become a moral alibi. Knowing replaces doing. Naming replaces changing.
We have confused attention with compassion.
Attention is passive. Compassion is costly.
Compassion asks something of us—time, presence, discomfort, risk. Attention asks only that we look. And so we look. Constantly. Briefly. Safely.
Who do you show up for when no one is watching?
Who would notice if you didn’t?
When violence happens, we’re quick to call it evil, and it is. But evil rarely arrives as spectacle. It grows quietly, fed by isolation, humiliation, loneliness, and a shrinking sense of meaning. Most perpetrators are not born monsters. They are people whose worlds collapse inward until grievance becomes identity.
This is not an excuse.
It’s a warning.
WE SHOULD BE FAR MORE AFRAID OF LONELINESS THAN IDEOLOGY.
We talk about safety after violence. Protocols. Policies. Statements. What we talk about far less is belonging before the breaking point. Where people feel indispensable, not just included. Needed, not merely tolerated. Seen, not just managed.
Violence often begins where irrelevance takes root.
Lately, I’ve found myself thinking less about perpetrators and more about our youth. About formation. About what we are teaching, not through speeches or rules, but through modeling and absence.
The other day I stood in line at Chipotle behind a group of high school students. Every single one of them was on their phone. Not talking. Not laughing. Not even pretending to be bored together. Just scrolling. Thumb. Screen. Thumb. Screen.
I asked them, casually, where they get their content from.
TikTok. Immediate. Unquestioned. As if there were no other answer.
What unsettled me wasn’t the phones. It was the silence. Not rebellious silence. Normal silence. This is how waiting is now filled. This is how emptiness is now avoided.
And this matters, especially if you’re younger and reading this.
This isn’t about blaming you. If anything, it’s about how much we’ve asked you to carry without giving you the tools to carry it.
You didn’t design this world. You inherited it.
You’re growing up in a system that offers infinite stimulation and very little guidance on how to make sense of what you’re feeling. You’re expected to process anxiety, anger, grief, and uncertainty in public, online, in real time—while being watched, judged, and quantified.
That’s not weakness. That’s an impossible assignment.
We’ve built a culture that rewards reaction, not reflection. Performance, not presence. Speed, not depth. And then we act surprised when people feel overwhelmed, disconnected, or angry without knowing why.
WE ARE RAISING A GENERATION FLUENT IN SIMULATION AND STARVED FOR FORMATION.
They feel everything.
They’re rarely taught how to name it.
They’re constantly connected.
They’re quietly alone.
And if I’m honest, I don’t know how to fix that.
I tell myself we should be teaching kids how to sit with discomfort. But I reach for my own phone when silence stretches too long. I tell myself we should teach them how to argue without cruelty, how to belong without performing, how to feel anger without turning it into identity. And then I watch adults model the opposite every day.
That’s the inheritance.
Not phones.
Not apps.
But a way of being.
This is what worries me most about the age of AI. Not that machines will replace us, but that we will outsource the hardest parts of being human—meaning-making, patience, judgment, restraint—to systems optimized for engagement, not wisdom.
When belonging is no longer rooted in people, place, or purpose, it migrates to spectacle. And spectacle is a terrible teacher of responsibility.
A society that can absorb repeated acts of violence without being morally interrupted is not resilient. It is anesthetized.
Resilience bends, reflects, and reforms.
Anesthesia numbs and forgets.
Which one are we practicing?
I don’t have solutions to offer here. What I have is an unresolved struggle. I want to sit with grief longer, but I feel the pull to move on. I want tragedy to interrupt me, but interruption is inconvenient. I want to be present, but presence requires energy I don’t always know how to replenish.
These aren’t resolutions. They’re tensions I’m carrying.
If nothing in my life changes after tragedy, then my words are not compassion. They’re choreography. And I’m complicit in that.
And this is where my thoughts return to Brown, to Bondi, to the lives that were interrupted in ways no essay can hold.
Not as headlines. Not as symbols. But as reminders.
Reminders that violence is never abstract. That it always lands somewhere specific—in a classroom, on a shoreline, in a family that will now measure time as before and after.
If we allow moments like these to pass through us without changing how we live, how we raise our children, how we teach them to belong and to make meaning, then we haven’t just failed to honor the dead.
We’ve failed the living.
WHAT WE’RE ACTUALLY BEING ASKED TO BUILD
We spend a lot of time asking how AI will change jobs, industries, and economies.
We spend far less time asking how it will change us.
In a world increasingly optimized for speed, stimulation, and scale, the real scarcity may not be opportunity—but judgment. Not information—but wisdom. Not connection—but responsibility.
I don’t believe the answer to this moment is less technology.
I believe it’s more humanity.
Not the sentimental kind. The disciplined kind. The kind that learns how to sit with discomfort, make sense of complexity, and carry responsibility when it would be easier to look away.
If we are entering a future shaped by intelligent systems, then the question that matters most is not what those systems can do—but what we choose to cultivate in ourselves alongside them.
Because whatever we neglect to develop in humans, we will eventually ask machines to compensate for.
And that trade will shape far more than our economy.
It will shape who we become.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
