We live in a world that trains us not to see. Not to stare. Not to name things as they are. Discomfort is treated like the real crime, while the horrors themselves get a free pass. So we scroll, we swipe, we distract. And we call it normal.
We’ve been taught to look away. From poverty, from violence, from grief, from the things that make our stomachs twist. And not just taught, we’ve been praised for it. Called polite. Mature. Normal.
But there’s a line, and it’s blurry as hell. Sometimes looking away is self-care. Sometimes it’s complacency. And sometimes it’s both at the same time.
Looking Away as Survival
Nobody can sit with the horrors of the world all day every day. Your nervous system will short-circuit. You will either collapse or numb out. So yes, sometimes you have to look away. That is not weakness, it is survival. Resting your mind, shutting off the noise, letting yourself breathe matters.
I know for me, if I don’t unplug sometimes, I turn into a shell of myself. I need breaks. I need silence. I need moments where I don’t know the details of what’s happening in the world. That is not denial; that is recovery.
That’s the self-care side.
Looking Away as Complicity
The other side of this is that oppressors love it when we look away. The whole setup is designed to keep our eyes sliding off the ugliness. “Don’t stare.” “Don’t point.” “Don’t talk about it.” Before you know it, politeness turns into a muzzle.
I’ve done it plenty. I’ve walked past homelessness without stopping. I’ve scrolled past footage of war because I was “too tired.” I’ve clicked away from stories I didn’t want in my head before bed. I don’t say that proudly, but I say it honestly. Because the machine counts on that. If we don’t look, we don’t act. And if we don’t act, the machine keeps running.
That’s the complacency side.
The Weaponization of Looking Away
It gets worse. Looking away isn’t just encouraged - it’s weaponized. We’ve all heard the rhetoric: “If you don’t like it, don’t look.” “Don’t bring politics into this.” “Don’t ruin dinner by talking about that.”
It’s framed as keeping the peace. But peace built on silence isn’t peace. It’s anesthesia. It’s bullshit dressed up as harmony. And it works. Because if we won’t look, we won’t question. If we won’t question, we won’t resist.
And it’s not only about war or politics. It seeps into the smallest, most ordinary places too. We’re told not to stare at fat people, disabled people, anyone whose body doesn’t fit the script of “normal.” The message isn’t compassion; it’s erasure. It’s, pretend you don’t see them, so maybe they’ll go away.
Same thing with behavior that doesn’t line up with expectations, the kid who stims in public, the person talking to themselves on the bus, the neighbor whose grief spills out too loudly. We are conditioned to look past it, as if not seeing it will somehow “fix” it.
But ignoring isn’t neutral. It’s a subtle form of disapproval. It’s a way of saying, your existence makes me uncomfortable, so I’ll act like it isn’t real. And that silence trains us to believe that difference itself is the problem, rather than the systems that refuse to accommodate it.
The Internal Mirror
It cuts even deeper. We don’t just look away from the world’s horrors, we learn to look away from our own.
How many of us can really sit with grief, anger, shame, or fear without rushing to numb it? I know I can’t always. My reflex is to fill the space and scroll, snack, drink, joke, distract. Something bad? Cover it. Another bad thing? Cover it again.
But distraction isn’t the only escape hatch. There is also busyness. We have built a whole culture on it. Stay productive. Stay efficient. Stay moving. Fill the silence with work, with goals, with one more task checked off the list. Because if you are not busy, what are you worth?
That is the lie we have absorbed, that value comes from output. That exhaustion equals importance. That being overwhelmed is a badge of honor. So instead of sitting with our emotions, we smother them with productivity. Instead of processing, we perform.
It doesn’t make us happier. It doesn’t make us whole. We’re busier than ever and somehow more disconnected than ever. We’ve been conditioned to trade our inner life for measurable output, to treat our humanity as something inefficient, something to manage or suppress.
It’s not that humans are too fragile to feel pain. It’s that we’ve been trained to believe feeling it makes us useless.
The Trap of Noticing Without Acting
The wild part is, we all know this. Intuitively. You feel it in your gut when you drive past suffering or scroll past a headline. That flash of recognition? That is your body telling you it matters.
But we have been conditioned to stop there. To notice, maybe feel bad for a second, and then move on. Sometimes even noticing becomes a trap - like, okay, I saw it, I acknowledged it, now I can scroll away. We accept the horrors as fixed, inevitable, “just the way the world is.”
But that is a fucking lie. The world didn’t just happen this way. It was built this way, by people, by systems, by choices. Which means it can be undone. Rebuilt. Reimagined.
And listen, I don’t know the solution. Not a clue. I have a few practices I am trying, but nothing neat enough to package into steps. What I do know is this, once I made the connection, once I started admitting that looking away isn’t neutral, I couldn’t unsee it. I couldn’t go back.
And strangely, since then, my nervous system has softened. I don’t know if it’s connected, or if it was just eclipse season messing with me, but there has been a calm I didn’t expect. Like some part of me finally stopped fighting against itself just by naming the thing.
Discernment as the Bridge
This is where the tension lives. Looking away can be care. It can also be complicity. Sometimes it is both at once, and that is what makes it so slippery.
The difference isn’t something you can chart on a graph or pin down with rules. It comes down to discernment, to asking yourself why you are turning your eyes away in the first place.
Am I putting my phone down because my body needs rest, or because I don’t want to feel guilty? Am I stepping back to recover so I can come back clearer, or am I stepping back because I would rather not face what is in front of me?
Those questions don’t always have tidy answers. And honestly, they are not supposed to. Discernment isn’t about perfection. It is about noticing. About staying awake to your own motives, even when they are messy, even when you don’t like what you find.
It is a practice. Not a solution, not a guarantee. Just practice, again and again.
Where I End Up
I don’t have a neat takeaway. I can’t tell you how much looking away is too much, or when rest turns into avoidance. All I know is that once you see the line, you can’t unsee it. And once you name it, you start noticing it everywhere; in yourself, in your habits, in the people around you.
That noticing alone will not change the world. But it can change how you live in it. It can change what you tolerate, what you excuse, what you call “normal.”
So maybe the real work isn’t about never looking away. Maybe it’s about being honest when you do. About asking yourself, What am I avoiding? Who does it serve? And what would it cost me to look a little longer?
I can’t answer those questions for anyone else. I can barely answer them for myself. But I do know this much - pretending not to see has never made anything go away.
And if we keep mistaking silence for peace, we will never know what peace actually feels like.
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