Indifference is cancer

... but so is reading the comments

I’ve been thinking about how we define “positive” and “negative” in everything we consume.

We talk about protecting our peace, staying away from everything negative, and keeping things light… but somewhere along the way, it all became an excuse to bury our heads in the sand and call it mindfulness.

What is “negative”, though?

When I say I want to avoid negative content, I’m talking about content that makes us feel like garbage for literally no reason.

You know what I mean, anon. Those videos we’re watching where people are just whining, complaining, trolling each other and nitpicking someone’s accounts for sport. We finish watching it, and our day is measurably worse now. Good job, we played ourselves.

And then we can also consume planned sadness. The aesthetic, beautifully animated despair.

Like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End. The show begins with the fact that Frieren’s friends are dead and stays there. Quietly, elegantly, relentlessly dead. It’s beautiful, but we can literally feel our serotonin levels evaporating while the violins play. It’s grief as atmosphere. We start sad and we remain sad, just with better lighting.

But take Spy × Family: little logic, everyone’s mildly unhinged, and it’s still very delightful. Nobody’s dead, the kid reads minds for dumb reasons, the fake marriage is thriving, and you actually laugh. It’s light, stupid, and healing.

Positive content is, therefore, something that leaves us lighter and doesn’t demand a full existential processing session afterward. Something that we should aim to consume more.

But wait, the title of this piece is “indifference is cancer”

Right. This is where I might start sounding like I’m contradicting myself with “avoid negative content” and “no, actually…”

Because I genuinely believe people should stay informed about what’s happening in the world, and I also genuinely understand why they don’t.

I get that most adults are working ungodly hours, dealing with their own problems, barely keeping their lives together. Who am I to demand they do more when they’re just exhausted and trying to survive?

The exhausted person can still know about Gaza or Ukraine without joining a protest or crying daily about it, though.

There’s the junk food negativity — pointless drama and whining, people trolling each other in comments, doomscrolling Twitter (X…) fights in the comments for three hours, content that just makes us feel bad with zero payoff, sad songs that spiral us downward for no reason, bitter discourse that leaves emotional residue on everything, comparison content that makes us feel worse about ourselves. This stuff is garbage. It doesn’t inform us, doesn’t help us, and doesn’t change us in any meaningful way. It just drains us dry and leaves us emptier than before.

Then there’s the necessary but still heavy content — major world events, conflicts affecting millions and eventually might afect us, historical patterns we really need to stop repeating. This serves a purpose, enables us to participate in democracy, and helps us understand our world. It’s information we need to know to be a functioning citizen, even if it sucks to read about.

The first negativity depletes us for nothing, the second negativity informs us for something.

Yep, our emotional capacity is limited, we literally cannot care equally about our family and every conflict in the world. But when we don’t even pay attention, someone else is always happy to pay attention for us — and they’ll be the ones deciding things, possibly cosplaying The Handmaid’s Tale.

History has this cool habit of breaking in through the back door while everyone’s watching comfort shows. And every time we act surprised.

So what’s a “normal” person supposed to do?

Great question. Glad I asked.

I already said “no to war”, what else?

I have the privilege of time to think about this stuff, but not everyone does. And it feels naive, and even arrogant, to demand everyone care the way I think they should.

So what can a normal person actually do?

Not much.

“Normal” people make things normal — that’s kinda our job description. If we stay awake, talk, write, question, and don’t let cruelty become wallpaper, that already shifts the temperature of the room.

We can’t fix global power structures between shifts at work. We can’t out-donate oil lobbies or rewrite foreign policy from our couch. But we can stay awake. We can pay attention to what’s shaping our own life, how our rent is decided, who’s gutting our healthcare, what our government is quietly passing. We can notice. We can talk about it. We can refuse to tune out completely.

That’s already revolutionary enough in all the countries, even in the seemingly developed and progressive and democratic and freedom-oriented and liberte egalite fraternite European ones.

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We can stay soft and stay informed.
We can love quiet mornings and still know what the world’s on fire about and take part in it.
We can protect our peace without disappearing into it.

Because indifference is cancer.
But so is reading the comments.

Let’s pick our poisons carefully.