We care about everything— and it's breaking us

It's 2 am and we’re still awake, scrolling through threads about another crisis unfolding halfway across the world. 

We’ve been at this for an hour, or maybe longer. Our chests feel tight. We’re angry at the injustice, the people in power and how unfair all of this is. 

We want to do something, but what? Sign another petition? Donate ten dollars we don't really have? Share a post that’ll disappear into everyone else’s stories? 

We close the laptop, stare at the ceiling, knowing we’ll do this all over again tomorrow. It’s a vicious cycle. 

Fast forward a few months and we’re scrolling again. Another tragedy. Another country. Another injustice. Only this time, there’s nothing. No tightness in the chest, no anger. 

We just keep scrolling and scrolling. When did that happen? When did we stop feeling it? It's not that we stopped caring but our brains couldn’t carry that weight anymore and still let us function. 

Somewhere along the way without us noticing, they just turned off. And somehow, numbness feels worse than being overwhelmed ever did.

This isn’t just me or you. This is what’s happening to GenZ, to an entire generation. We’re told we’re apathetic, too distracted by our phones, too self-absorbed to care about the world.

But the truth is that we care about everything we see: every crisis, every injustice, every tragedy we see on our phones. The problem is we have almost no power to actually fix most of it. That gap between how much we care and how little we can do is what’s breaking us.

We carry devices that deliver every global crisis directly to us, all day, every day. Wars, climate disasters, injustice, suffering. It’s all there, algorithmically curated to keep us scrolling. Instagram knows that a post about humanitarian crisis gets more engagement than a meme, so that’s what it keeps showing. 

We didn’t choose this, we were born into it. The 24/7 news cycle, the social media feeds designed to hold our attention, the culture that says staying informed is a moral obligation. It was all built around us before we even had a choice.

Then there's the performance of caring. If you don’t post about it, do you even care? If you’re silent, are you complicit? So we repost it, share fundraisers, sign petitions because not saying anything feels worse. 

But here's what no one talks about: All this is so exhausting. The constant awareness, the pressure to have the right opinion on every issue, the guilt when you scroll past something without engaging, the feeling that no matter what you do it's just never

enough.

We all feel it. You're in a group chat with friends and someone shares a news article about the latest crisis. Three people react to it, someone types “this is so sad” and then there is silence before the topic is changed. No one calls anyone out because we all get it. 

The crisis is still happening, but we can’t sit in that heaviness forever. So we move on and feel guilty about it. Say you’re laughing with your friend about something stupid and halfway through you remember there is a war happening right now, people are dying and you’re here laughing in a cafe. 

The guilt hits but you don’t stop because what else are you supposed to do? Sit in grief every waking moment? So you keep going while the guilt stays and nobody says it out loud. 

This is what caring about everything actually looks like. It’s not inspirational or empowering. It’s just exhausting. And everyone around us is living it too, wondering if they’re the only one who feels this broken. 

Here’s what makes it worse: we’re the most aware generation in history. Studies show that 73% of GenZ reports feeling overwhelmed by global problems and nearly half feel anxious about world events daily. But awareness doesn’t equal power.

Knowing doesn’t mean we can fix it. The actions available to us feel microscopic. A war doesn’t stop because we shared a post or climate crisis won’t reverse because we signed an online form. We know all of this but we do it anyway because doing nothing feels worse. 

So we’re stuck caring deeply about problems we can’t solve, taking actions that feel performative and then feeling like frauds or failures or both.

When we admit we’re struggling, the advice we get is always the same: Just log off social media and practice selfcare. It sounds reasonable but it misses the point. Logging off doesn’t make the crises stop. It just means we’re not watching them. For a generation raised on “silence is complicity”, that comes with guilt. 

We’re supposed to stay informed, stay engaged, bear witness. So when we log off, we don't feel relieved. We feel like we’ve failed.

And pick your battles? We’re not choosing to care about everything. We’re being shown everything. The algorithm doesn’t care what we can handle, it just delivers crisis after crisis because that’s what keeps us scrolling. The advice treats this like we just need better boundaries but individual solutions can’t fix systemic problems. 

This isn’t about us failing to manage our emotions but about a system that demands constant emotional labor and offers

almost nothing in return.

So what does the breaking look like? It's not dramatic, it's quiet. It's scrolling past a tragedy and realizing you didn't feel anything. Not sadness, not anger, nothing. You just kept scrolling. 

It's the realization that somewhere between the doom scrolling at 2 am and now something shut down, not because you stopped caring but because your brain couldn’t sustain that level of feeling and still let you function. So it went numb.

That numbness breaks us in a way that overwhelm never did because at least when we were overwhelmed we were still feeling something. The numbness feels like loss, like something important died without us noticing. We're not apathetic. We’re surviving the only way our minds know how. 

But it doesn’t feel like survival, it feels like failure. I don’t have an answer for how to fix this or how we're supposed to care about everything without breaking. But I know we can’t keep pretending like its fine. 

We can’t keep demanding that young people stay aware, stay engaged, stay informed and then act surprised when they go numb trying to survive it. We can’t keep designing systems that profit from our emotional exhaustion and then blame us for being exhausted.

Maybe the numbness is the signal we’ve been ignoring and maybe it’s our bodies telling us something the world hasn’t figured out yet. That constant exposure to suffering without the power to meaningfully address it isn’t engagement, its trauma. 

We care about everything and it's breaking us. Maybe it's time to stop asking what’s wrong with us and start asking

what’s wrong with the system that demands we care this way.

Vishakha Singhal is curious, ambitious, opinionated and has never been interested in doing things the conventional way. An MBA student from India, she has worked across finance operations for international clients, led social events and campaigns reaching 800+ people.

Vishakha manages a global podcast amplifying women's leadership stories. She has also collaborated on education research with the University of Konstanz. Driven by curiosity and strong opinions, she writes about youth leadership, social impact and what it means to care deeply in systems that weren't built for it.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the author are her own and do not in any way reflect those of Paraluman News.