The Paradox of Awareness: How Infinite Access Has Cost Us Our Peace 

This essay is the second place winner in our annual high school essay contest. Congratulations to Abigail Biggins, a high school student from Massachusetts.

She was disfigured, but she never had to look in the mirror. She was a saint, but she never knew the name of the pope. Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the Mohawk responsible for much of the Christianization of New York during the seventeenth century, lived a life of holiness, treating every individual she met as a child of God. Despite her lack of information about world religions, politics, or even Catholic authority, Kateri brought joy and hope to those around her, and is now recognized as the first Native American saint. She was not aware of the issues plaguing Europe at the time, nor was she constantly made aware of her facial deformity as she chased “likes.” Her lack of distraction better equipped her to serve where she was called and maintain an overall level of joy in her work. She lived in an age less developed, but her mission was clear and her distractions minimal.

The wealth of technology and sheer access to information we possess today has been consistently portrayed as a positive shift in intellectual thought, making education more efficient and available. But, in the wake of a revolution resulting in the past, present, and anticipated future of the world at our fingertips, we’ve lost sight of the importance of living the life in front of us, sowing seeds of anxiety rather than ambition in our children. The biggest challenge our generation faces is not the various social, economic, or political issues at hand, but rather, our attitude towards them due to our rapidly expanding access to information about them.  

Scrolling toward Cynicism: The Mechanism Behind the Madness 

This generation is not the first to witness suffering, but we encounter it much differently than our elders did. The issues that hit close to home before the rise of social media and political gridlock were the issues that forced real-time action. Wars like Vietnam, which made local headlines, deployed soldiers our elders needed to come home. Disease outbreaks weren’t cause for alarm unless they were in one’s local area. Political elections didn’t divide families and end friendships but were reflections of opinions on public policy versus issues of morality. Suffering was encountered but it was isolated; our elders weren’t responsible for carrying the problems of the world, but were called to answer to local issues in the ways they could, often in a way which allowed them to still preserve joy and optimism in their individual lives.  

With the rise of social media and the ability to access information from anywhere at any time, our generation has no natural stopping point for exposure to the evils of the world. While our grandparents could simply finish the newspaper and continue on, we are bombarded constantly with headlines, news updates, videos, and messages at all hours of the day. We are surrounded by apps whose creators aim to keep us clicking, and bad news reaches us disproportionately to comparative joy. The efficiency that allows news to essentially travel in real time leaves us feeling significantly closer, and thus more attached, to, these issues. The content we are exposed to isn’t a snapshot of current events, but a curated selection of crises chosen to provoke a reaction. With these reactions happening all day every day, we aren’t processing their relative significance, or our responsibility to them, but are instead perpetually alternating between grief and alarm in a cycle of cynicism that keeps us scrolling.  

The Cost of Cynicism: Distracting Us from the Daily 

This cycle of grief isn’t contained in the moments we spend online, but bleeds into our day-to-day mentality. The toll of being chronically worried about the issues of the world erodes our ability to be fully present in our individual lives, available for our families, and proportionately joyful in times of great happiness. While we are often surrounded by ample blessings, we find ourselves searching for permission to enjoy them, because somewhere else, others are unable to. Additionally, when presented incessantly with issues we may sympathize with, we find ourselves flooded with a toxic activism: our levity is stolen by anger at the sheer multitude of injustices in the world, and whether we’re personally affected or not, the internet insists it’s our responsibility to hold and announce opinions on all of them. 

Considering the amount of space, time, and people we feel responsible for, our ambition becomes helplessness, which robs us of our ability to consider our own blessings. The subsidiarity of our elders’ issues allowed them to make tangible plans for change, such as helping neighbors, supporting local organizations, or voting in their nearest elections, whereas our global-scale panic simply paralyzes us into a mindset where we can barely make ourselves fathom the surplus of wars, crises, and changes in the world, much less take active steps to fix them. Instead of focusing on practical solutions, we use performed anguish through involvement in countless service clubs and protests as its substitute. We “raise awareness” without ever taking the next step towards overcoming a problem, meaning that despite our efforts, we only have more to lament at the end of the day. The biggest problem we face isn’t any of the individual issues we’re alerted about, but rather our inability to find purpose joyfully within the daily events of our individual lives.  

Aware vs. Equipped: The Generational Contrast 

Our elders may argue that they were sheltered from the events of the world, whereas we have a level of awareness about what’s really going on. While this may be true, perhaps we’ve overestimated the benefits of global information in our pursuit of innovation, and in doing so, lost sight of the merits of a mindset of subsidiarity. The issues our elders faced were presented in limited ways, through necessary bounded exposure that matched the finite emotional bandwidth possessed by all humans to process and act upon crises. During the Cold War, for instance, once a broadcast was over, or the newspaper finished, our elders could step away from the chaos and process their responses while continuing life. Now, because our seemingly infinite awareness is not coupled with an infinite capacity to act, we often lose the ability to act entirely, because we are so busy considering the issues we feel we have to solve. It’s the paradox of choice applied to global events in a way that hurts most prominently those with significant access to information. Our elders have not equipped us with the ability to step away from crisis information, because they didn’t need to possess it at the level we are being called to today.  

Moving Forward with Joy 

While the issues laid out in this essay, stemming from overabundance of information, may appear to manifest in our generation as ingratitude, entitlement, or cynicism, the true diagnosis leaves more room for successful intervention from our elders. We aren’t inherently cynical; we’re struggling to manage a surplus of untrained grief. Our elders don’t need to remove our screens altogether or shelter us entirely from the issues of the world. As previously established, awareness has significant benefits, but only when coupled with the appropriate skills necessary to absorb and understand as individuals the situations before us.

This is why, if our elders could understand one aspect of the challenges of this generation, it would be that we need guidance in cultivating the skill of practical discernment when it comes to evaluating global matters. We need to be formed in the ability to distinguish between the issues that demand our necessary action and those that do not. We need help deciding which burdens are ours to carry and those we aren’t expected to hold close. Our empathy has been turned against us, as we’ve allowed it to turn us cold. We need the help of those who have gone before us, the people who have seen and understood suffering but have balanced it with great joy. We need to be reminded of the many blessings we have that are not diminished by the presence of pain in our world.  

This generation has the capacity to care deeply, to respond skillfully, and to live joyfully. What we’ve lost is our ability to balance those capacities. Our elders lived in an era when the balance was provided for them. Now we need them to help us restore that balance. We’re meant for so much more than cynicism and distraction. We’re capable of great change through the creation of great solutions. We just need support in maintaining a disposition of joy by properly ordering our worries. When we can faithfully reclaim the delight which we were created for, we’ll be able to transform the world, just as our elders, through their joy, transformed it for us. We’ll be able to attend to our own communities the way Saint Kateri attended to hers—wrapped in love and without distraction. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.