I was in the car with my wife and kids on a short vacation with my extended family when my dad sent me a text that the U.S. had started dropping bunker busters on Iranian nuclear facilities. Like any good parent, I generally try to stay as present as I can when my children are with me. As with any parent, that’s sometimes a challenge. Normally it’s the incessant chatter of social media and private chat groups that steals my attention away, though I’ve gotten better at ignoring those. But from time to time it’s the actual news.

I told my wife what was happening, and instead of reminding me, as she has a thousand times before, to put my phone away when the family is together, she volunteered to switch driving with me after lunch so I could dive into my twitter hole. This time, we both understood, it wasn’t some stupid online squabble that was competing for my attention; it was an actual war. Sometimes it’s ok to be distracted.

I found myself checking my phone through lunch, as I would throughout the next couple of days, to find out if Iran had struck back, whether we were truly in another Middle Eastern war. I work in journalism, so I like to stay on top of the news, but more than that, it felt important as a human being in a moment of peril such as this to keep track of what was unfolding in the real world outside of the narrow bubble of my immediate, vacation-bound existence. It felt like the morally responsible thing to do.

But this was where I began to feel a touch of existential cognitive dissonance. I’ve become accustomed to thinking of the world on my screen — the world of breaking news — as a synthetic reality that steals time away from my actual life with my kids, my wife, my friends and relatives. For the most part that’s exactly what it is. But it’s also the looking glass through which I expand my horizons beyond my comfortable middle class American existence, as any good global citizen should do.

It’s hard to reconcile the two. We deplore the bubbles we live in, which shelter us from the bleak realities of the world that we’d rather turn away from: poverty, starvation, war, genocide. We expect ourselves to bear witness to the crimes and tragedies befalling millions of people in countries we’ve never set foot in — it’s literally the least we can do. But when we shift our focus to those tragedies, it’s by turning our eyes toward the same screens that are relentlessly hawking us Blue Chews and Grand Theft Auto 6, that bait us with cartoon memes and fake AI humanoids, that goad us into outrage with news clips stripped of context and dishonest headlines designed to reinforce our prior assumptions and prejudices. It’s like taking Communion in a strip club.

So we learn of the latest news from Gaza in a stream of undifferentiated verbal vomit that looks something like this:

absolutely INSANE footage coming out of nyc right now WOW JK Rowling is a TERF CUNT who deserves to DIE a SLOW DEATH an infant died of starvation this morning in a NICU for lack of milk due to Israel’s humanitarian blockade GOD BLESS TRUMP FOR MAKING LIBTARDS SCARED AGAIN the Islamic-left alliance is paving the way for the next Holocaust lmfao Ted Cruz is a sea cucumber in a human flesh suit KEEP HER UP ALL NIGHT WITH BLUE CHEWS Gaza tent encampment bombed by IDF 14 people dead in blaze holy shit this new kendrick lamar is straight fire

This is the medium through which we learn of the gravest events that befall humankind. It’s how we become informed of a US military strike on Iran, riots in Los Angeles, an escalation of the war in Ukraine. After learning of the breaking news, we might then turn to the New York Times for a less adulterated experience, but even there, the Times’ Live Updates feed reduces our news consumption into 200 word chunks, refreshed every 20 or so minutes. It’s cleaner, more reliable, more serious and less toxic than your social media news feed, but it mimics it in form if not in content. No less than Twitter or Facebook, it turns events into posts.

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None of this is new. For decades, we’ve watched wars and catastrophes unfold within the endlessly looping cable news cycle, interspersed with ads for geriatric pharmaceutical drugs and Indian casinos. Years ago, even reading an actual morning newspaper was nothing more than a ritual of exposing yourself to a digest of the world’s horrors between deciding whether to eat oatmeal or toast for breakfast and listening to the same news repackaged for the radio in your gridlocked morning commute. That’s nobody’s fault; it’s just being human in the modern world. We zoom out and then we zoom in again. That longer focal length is where we live our lives. It’s where find the people we love, the work that fulfills us, and the comforts that fill our days with small pleasures and rewards. Zooming out is mostly a chore we perform out of moral obligation.

But it’s also different now than it was before. We no longer choose when and where the broader world intrudes into our field of vision. If your job is in front of a computer, the flotsam and jetsam of the news floats in and out of your workflow at random, usually sequestered in your peripheral vision but sometimes pushing your daily tasks momentarily out of view. Waiting for the subway, in between sets at the gym, or surreptitiously at the dinner table, we might check in with our screen and scroll past an image of a lifeless, limbless child in a pool of blood, just below a post about the state of Beyoncé’s marriage to JAY-Z and above one comparing some politician to Hitler. It’s all presented in the same aspect ratio and in the same visual format with the same flat level of attention-seeking urgency. We know that one is more important than the other — we’re not stupid — but all of the sensory cues invite us to believe otherwise. Our thumbs scroll through it all at the same pace. Our cortisol levels barely budge. Celebrity gossip, war crimes, life hacks: it’s all just a single stream of informational slop.

The very real pain of others — families running from invading armies, refugees huddled into camps, patients bombed in their hospital beds — dissipate into the simulacra of mass media. They become spectacle, and then an instant later, weaponry for partisan outrage-mongering. They morph into caricatures of politicians as Churchills and Chamberlains, into tirades against the libtard media or the right-wing hate machine, into prompts for split second decisions on whether to share or keep scrolling, into unhinged conspiracy theories. The world is transmuted into signal and then into noise.

I’m increasingly alarmed by the suspicion that it’s no different for those who are actually creating the events that we scroll through than it is for the rest of us. Many world leaders today are younger than me. If anything, they’re even more online than I am. They aren’t juggling their attention to world events with taking their kids to swim class or cooking them dinner — they have people for that. Far from detoxing themselves from social media, they can’t afford not to know what the algorithms are serving up to the constituencies they answer to. Their brains are as addled by social media platforms as a high school teenager. Are the wars they start responses to actual material conditions and circumstances in the world? Or are they just more content, public performances for online clout accumulation, no different than a TikTok video or a Twitch livestream? Netanyahu appears to have lured Trump into striking Iran largely by getting more likes, shares, and obsequious cable pundit news hits than the President for a few hours following Israel’s bombardment. Does the seamless marbling of real life and the simulacrum of our news feeds poison the brains of our generals, our heads of state, and our corporate oligarchs as much as, and quite possibly more than, you and I? How much of the world’s conflict is driven these days by shitposting?

The real world is no longer for everyone. It’s for the unlucky few. If you live in Ukraine or the Gaza Strip, you know it well. If you live below the poverty line in America, you know it, too. If you watch most of the world’s tragedies unfold on your screen, you probably float between it and its mediated representation, never quite aware of the boundary between the two.