I know a lot of things. Far more than anyone could have known in times past. News stories are no longer distant rumors in scribbled letters from some unreachable, irrelevant corner. It’s whispers in my ear, urging me to pay attention to this planet I inhabit. TV shrinks it in half; the internet, tenfold. I know a lot of things, for my eyes enjoy the vantage point of modernity. This planet feels small, but it’s huge. So vast in shape, color, and texture that trying to hold it all in my mind gives me a headache. I know a lot of things, so my head hurts. We Spaniards say “el mundo es un pañuelo” (“the world is a handkerchief”) when we run into someone we used to know at an unexpected place. But only in the last few decades has this metaphor of smallness become a tangible reality: we’re literally trying to fit the world in a screen the size of a handkerchief. And a handkerchief it is, since all it seems to do is soak up the tears of those who watch and watch and watch the horrors unfolding here and there.
But how could I say no? How could I deny the news coming from Palestine, or Ukraine, or India, or sub-Saharan Africa, or the mafia-ridden outposts of Latin America, or the drought-cracked lands of the Maghreb, or the hurricane-battered islands of the Caribbean, the space it deserves in my aching heart? It takes a singular lack of sympathy to turn a deaf ear, or maybe just a deep need to deny the privilege that keeps me separated by sea or border from those earthly hells.
It is not out of grief and overwhelm that my head hurts, but guilt: As I write, highly civilized human beings are committing atrocities, unspeakable horrors. Yet I am unfairly safe. For the screen I’m peaking into is not a mirror but a genuine window into this small planet. Knowing what’s happening in every town, city, province, and country of the world isn’t just inhuman—for them, for enduring it helplessly; for us, for witnessing it hopelessly—but a constant reminder that I fall short of the moral imperative we all carry tattooed on the soul: help those in need.
News stories serve, however, a positive function. They put into perspective the comfort I enjoy in the developed world (if that qualifier still means anything). I can look at my 70-square-meter apartment inside a 25-family block in a quiet, modest neighborhood of Madrid, and compare it to the suffering and devastation in Gaza, and realize how well I’m doing. And, at the same time, I can hold that feeling up against the long Forbes list of billionaires and feel my blood heat up at the rate at which the number grows, despite the Great Recession, despite COVID, despite the wars, despite the world being a handkerchief. I know a lot of things, and if I didn’t, I’d have no choice but to ignore the ongoing reality of this small planet; immoral of me.
At the same time, I lose something I’d value dearly. Valuable in an imagined sense—symbolic, maybe—since I was born into an era that had long forgotten its worth: the spiritual acceptance that naturally arises from seeing life through the most mundane routines, through the most protective short-sightedness. Back then, half the world could’ve been burning in a premature apocalypse, and, without carrier pigeons to reach me, I wouldn’t have cared. No one aims to be ignorant; no one respects those who are. And still, how easy it is to accept—almost a cliché—that it’s the ignorant who live happiest. (If not the ignorant, the indifferent, which, in a world that serves you ugly news with every meal, amounts to the same thing.)
No one aims to be ignorant, but we wish for it, with a kind of longing unbefitting of, yet all too common among the privileged; we wish to leave it all behind and live in a little house near the woods, the hills, the river. Is it even possible to accept such a wildly heterogeneous world, the way Henry Miller or Walt Whitman or Anton Chekhov or Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson might have, with their selective sight, their wistful tenderness toward the nearby, their gentle blindness to the rest?
The human mind can’t hold together the massacre in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the conflict between India and Pakistan—just the ones the outlets insist on showing, while many others vanish for lack of coverage—alongside the rivers and lush greenery of the hills nearby. It can’t reconcile the natural disasters—like the fires that ravaged the North of Spain earlier this summer consequence of a deadly recipe of bad policies and a heat wave, which, by itself, has killed thousands of people in the last couple of months alone—with the statistics saying that over the past century, almost every global well-being indicator has improved. (As a regular news reader, you’ll be angry at me for saying that “things are broadly going better than ever before.” I am, too.)
In Inside the Whale, one of my favorite of George Orwell’s essays, he says that the writers of the 1920s (right after the Great War) were “predominantly pessimistic” because they were writing in an “exceptionally comfortable epoch.” And he adds: “It is just in such times that ‘cosmic despair’ can flourish. People with empty bellies never despair of the universe, nor even think about the universe, for that matter.” And although I deeply agree with the sentiment, I have to correct him with all due respect: He couldn’t have predicted 24/7 cable news and a thousand TV channels and social media recommendation algorithms to realize that it’s not just “exceptionally comfortable” epochs that create this kind of inexorable despair. Today, it is a feature of the world; the writers of the 1920s may have experienced their pessimism through their comfort, but our curse is the opposite: pessimism overwhelms us despite our 70-square-meter apartments because there’s no comfort in knowing a lot of things.
We live in an “exceptionally comfortable” time in the immediacy of our neighborhoods and as portrayed by institutionalized charts, but we're painfully aware—and painfully impotent—that there's actually nothing exceptionally comfortable in the places where the news happens. The harder the times, says Orwell, the more you need to hide inside the whale and find a “cushioned space” where the world can't touch you. The easier the times, the more we make up an illusory despair. So what do you do when you have both at the same time? You carry a cognitive dissonance that yields the fabulous cocktail of modernity: external turmoil and internal desolation.
We wage a perpetual war against our natural origins; of all the battles we’ve chosen, the pursuit of knowing a lot of things—not in the standard sense of knowledge but in the modern sense of information—is the worst. Being aware of what happens beyond the seas and the borders gives life a sense of vastness, but it also highlights, more than anything else, the deep powerlessness of being human: As I look out the window at the yellowing willows swaying in the wind, I realize that although my gaze now reaches the infinite, my hands have not grown an inch.