Has our mind stopped feeling Gaza’s pain?

The era of emotional numbness

Horror, destruction, and suffering.Our everyday life is constantly stimulated by what’s happening in Gaza: images and videos scroll across our screens at the speed of a click — yet our brain doesn’t seem to feel it anymore.How did we get here?

Starting in 1965, the Vietnam War marked a turning point in civilian involvement in international affairs. The “first televised war” triggered a deep public awareness, largely due to the visual trauma of the conflict’s broadcast images.

This evolution of overexposure has reached its peak today, with videos of the genocide in Gaza: a continuous pain haunting our devices — a pain made of bodies, lifeless faces, and destruction.And yet, as Ana Maria Sepe, expert and researcher in psychoanalysis, explains, when the stimulus becomes constant, the brain no longer reacts empathically as it should. Routine shuts down the space for processing trauma, leading us to react in two ways: either we embrace desensitization, or we increase our own spectrum of violence in intensity.

To anesthetize what we see does not mean to ignore its importance or to diminish its symbolic weight; it means that our brain, in protecting itself from repeated emotional trauma, lowers our capacity for empathy.The danger that lurks is a shift — from outrage over the facts to an almost total emotional indifference when faced with such images.

The demonstrations of these past days show that something is still moving through the streets and squares of our cities, that anger and frustration for the Palestinian cause are deeply felt within our generation.And yet, we must still ask ourselves: does all this still hurt our mind?