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No More Hashtags: The Wars we've Forgotten

There was a time not too long ago when every scroll on social media brought up the war in the Middle East. Every second story on a news platform had harrowing headlines from Ukraine or Gaza. There was outrage, heartbreak, hashtags, candlelight vigils, reposted art, poems, and photos, and a collective swell of grief from people watching the world crumble from behind screens. But now? It’s quiet. Eerily quiet. The wars haven’t ended. The children haven’t stopped dying. The people haven't stopped starving. The bombs haven’t stopped falling. The suffering hasn’t paused. But our collective attention has.


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Maybe it’s because we feel helpless. Maybe it’s because we feel hopeless. Maybe it’s because staying angry and heartbroken every day is exhausting. Or maybe it's just that something else is now trending. This is what it feels like - compassion fatigue. Empathy burnout. The slow, creeping numbness that settles in when your heart simply can’t break anymore without falling apart. When you’ve cried once, ten times, a hundred - and now your body protects you by shutting down the parts that feel too much.


And maybe that makes sense in a way. No human is built to hold endless pain. No one is meant to witness genocide, displacement, torture, starvation, bombings, massacres - and still be expected to get to work on time, cook dinner, smile politely at strangers, and check in on emails. So we start to distance ourselves. We stop reading the articles. We scroll past the videos. We start pretending we didn’t see it. Because it’s easier that way. Because if we let ourselves feel it all, we may never be able to stop.


Compassion fatigue and empathy burnout aren’t just big words for “I’m tired.” They’re what happens when our systems are so constantly flooded with pain - from war, violence, poverty, injustice - that we either shut down or begin to feel numb. We scroll past headlines, pause briefly, and then go on with our day, often with guilt tagging along. We tell ourselves it’s not that we don’t care, it’s just… too much. And in the case of long-standing crises like Gaza or Ukraine, the helplessness starts to feel louder than the horror. You don’t know what to say anymore. You fear saying the wrong thing. You want to care but feel like your care changes nothing. So we retreat, not because we are cruel, but because we are human. Because staying open to it all can feel like bleeding out.


But that’s where the danger lies too. Because when enough people turn away, the world goes silent. And when the world is silent, power wins. Oppression wins. And the people who need us the most are left unheard, unseen, unacknowledged. It’s not that feeling fatigued makes you a bad person. It makes you human. But what do we do with that humanity?


There’s another reason some people have chosen silence, and this is the discomfort of speaking about any of it. The moment you post, you’re labelled. Sides are drawn, and any expression of empathy or solidarity becomes political. If you say 'Free Palestine', you're accused of being antisemitic. If you say 'I stand with Israel', you're accused of supporting occupation and genocide. And in all of this, people forget that real lives are being lost. Innocent lives. Children's lives. There is no 'other side' to the fact that babies are being buried, homes are being bombed, people are being erased. And yet the algorithm will punish you for saying it. So you stop. We all do. Or we censor ourselves to say just enough, not too much. Because we’re afraid. Because we’re tired. Because we’re unsure what ‘good’ even looks like anymore.


But even in fatigue, we owe the world our remembering. We owe it to the children who are still growing up in war zones. To the families who are waking up to the sound of sirens. To the people whose grief doesn't get a break just because our feeds have moved on. Even if we cannot fix anything, we can still witness, honour and remember. We can still hold space. We can still refuse to normalize suffering.


And while we are at it. Self-preservation matters too as we try to not shut ourselves from these horrors entirely. When the world is overwhelming, small acts of grounding become vital - stepping away from doomscrolling, giving yourself permission to rest, talking to someone about the emotional weight you’re carrying, or even journaling the helplessness instead of denying it. Staying informed is important, but so is staying intact. Because if we all burn out, who will hold space for the pain? Self-care in this context is not selfish. It’s resistance. It’s how we remind ourselves that our empathy still matters - even if it’s quiet, even if it’s tired, even if it’s unsure. Especially then.


This isn’t a call for performative grief. It’s not about posting every day or arguing with people online or consuming tragedy to the point of collapse. It’s about not forgetting. Not becoming so used to injustice that we stop seeing it. It's about keeping our compassion alive in ways that don't burn us out - by donating quietly, by having difficult conversations, by teaching our children empathy, by voting with conscience, by choosing the stories we amplify, by holding our own governments accountable.


Maybe it’s okay that we can’t carry it all. But what’s not okay is pretending there’s nothing left to carry. Because the war hasn’t ended just because we stopped talking about it. The pain hasn’t gone away just because the algorithm moved on. And maybe, just maybe, the most radical thing we can do is to keep our hearts soft in a world that wants us to harden. To resist the numbness. To care anyway and to remember anyway.


Written by: Vedica Podar



August, 2025

 
 
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