“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms... Must we not ourselves become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
The Gay Science, Nietzsche
I was recently sent an article by a colleague with the subject line: “Make it make sense!!,” punctuated by a string of despairing emojis. It wasn’t the first news-related distress signal I’d received that week, and wouldn’t be the last. But it did capture a distinct feeling of moral disorientation I’ve increasingly observed in response to global events. This feeling—perhaps best described as the struggle to metabolise or make sense of the morality of acts unfolding on the global stage—has gradually become more prominent in the language of news reporting, podcasts, and social media feeds. Frequently, it is framed in terms of psychological symptoms such as overwhelm, impaired processing, and dissociation. I was particularly struck by a recent New Yorker essay, in which the author described their 'broken brain'—a striking example of how quasi-clinical language has filtered into mainstream cultural commentary.
The migration of psychological terms into general discourse—trauma, dissociation, "broken brain"—echoes what psychologists call concept creep: the tendency for harm-related concepts to expand their meanings over time, encompassing an ever-wider range of phenomena. While such terms may help validate our collective sense of overwhelm, their overuse risks diluting conceptual precision and lacks epistemic clarity in describing broad cultural moods. More critically, they may contribute to a saturated discourse of distress, which rarely prompts active engagement with the underlying problem. This is particularly because these terms often invoke cognitive states like dissociation, which inherently encourage detachment and passivity.
A more constructive endeavour, if the goal is genuine understanding, may be to ask: why does sensemaking feel so difficult right now? What forces are driving the current breakdown in collective meaning-making? As I’ve sat with these questions in recent weeks, three features have stood out—each demanding closer attention: the instability of the Overton window, the effects of digitally proximate atrocities, and the legacy of having been trained for stability during a time of relative peace. I argue that these forces are now converging to create a perfect storm of moral disorientation, marked by rapid shifts in what is politically acceptable, relentless exposure to global suffering, and the collapse of a peaceful worldview that once shaped many of our expectations. Crucially, understanding these dynamics may help us craft more coherent responses and, in turn, build greater resilience amid rising uncertainty and upheaval.
1. The Overton Window Shift and the Rise of Radical Politics
Alongside the recent rise of radical politics across several Western contexts (America, United Kingdom, Europe), the last five years have also brought a rapid shift in the Overton window. Devised by policy analyst Joseph Overton, the Overton Window refers to the range of political ideas considered acceptable within public discourse at any given time. It defines the territory in which politicians can reasonably operate without being dismissed as fringe or out of touch. While the term originates in policy analysis, it’s a useful shorthand for understanding how public tolerance for certain ideas shifts over time.
Consider these examples from Trump's campaigns:
1. 2015: “Total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
At the time, this was widely condemned as unconstitutional, discriminatory, and extreme.
2. 2024: “We will use the military to the fullest extent allowed by law to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
This recent rhetoric—with its allusions to ethnic-cleansing movements—represents a shift in the kind of ideas deemed politically acceptable. In 2015, phrases like ‘mass deportation’ would have been deemed extreme. Today, such ideas function as a centrepiece of a mainstream campaign, because Trump’s campaigning has successfully shifted the Overton Window.
While the Trump era has played a central role in normalising xenophobic and authoritarian language in the U.S., this shift isn't confined to America. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) transitioned from being a minority group to becoming the third-largest party by 2021, mainstreaming language about 'remigration' and ethno-nationalism that would have been unthinkable in post-war German politics. In Italy, Matteo Salvini's Lega transformed from a regional separatist party to a national force promoting 'Italians first' policies that echo historical exclusionary movements. These aren't merely electoral gains, but redefinitions of the boundaries of public discourse.
While a radical shift in policy may be universally disorienting, this is especially the case for those on the liberal left, whose political orientation was shaped by a belief in gradual social progress. For the left and centre-left, the early 2000s appeared to represent a baseline of hard-won gains: LGBTQ+ rights, abortion access, institutional commitments to equality. These hard-won gains now feel newly unstable because of recent policy shifts. In the U.S., over twenty states have passed laws restricting gender-affirming care. In Hungary and Uganda, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has been embedded into law. Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. While Trump's rhetoric might be dismissed as the pendulum symbolically swinging back, these policy shifts suggest the values transformation is increasingly structural. The rapid normalisation of once-unthinkable positions has left many struggling to find stable moral ground. These rapid shifts also create a moral elasticity that serves those in power well; when the boundaries of outrage shift constantly, almost any proposal—however reprehensible—can be presented as legitimate policy discourse.
From a sense-making perspective, two aspects of this phenomenon may heighten feelings of moral disorientation. First, the rapid normalisation of previously unthinkable ideas. Take the example of Gaza: in the past year, the threshold for moral shock has shifted considerably. Journalists now rely on increasingly evocative headlines—such as “UN says 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in next 48 hours2”—to capture public attention.
Second, the proliferation of extreme opinions and ideologies—both online and in politics—means we are no longer contending with a single far-right or far-left party, but instead navigating a noisy, fragmented spectrum of radical movements and policy proposals.
Together, these dynamics contribute to a moral landscape marked by volatility and fragmentation, complicating attempts at ethical orientation and collective sensemaking.
2. The Proximity of Atrocity: Digitalisation and the End of Emotional Distance
In addition to the shift in morally viable ideas, there has also been a shift in how we engage with these ideas. Specifically, the proximity of atrocity—enabled by digital technologies, especially social media—has fundamentally changed how we encounter global suffering.
While conflicts in Ethiopia, Ukraine, and Palestine have inflated recent death tolls from inter- and intra-state conflicts, absolute death tolls in the 2020s remain modest by historical standards. These statistics suggest that the scale of violence we’ve seen in recent years is not unprecedented. However, the immediacy with which we experience these conflicts has shifted dramatically.
This shift is perhaps best understood by examining how the delivery of news has evolved over the past century: in the early 1900s, newspapers provided periodic summaries of distant events, often days after they occurred. Radio introduced live updates, particularly during WWII, while television in the 1950s brought scheduled news bulletins into domestic life. CNN's 1991 Gulf War coverage marked the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, with live broadcasts from Baghdad as bombs fell—the first-time war became a continuous televisual experience. The 2010-2011 Arab Spring introduced citizen journalism via Twitter, with revolution unfolding in real-time through hashtags and smartphone footage. By 2022, TikTok videos of Ukrainian civilians hiding in subway stations reached global audiences within hours, unmediated by traditional editorial processes. In 2025, much of the traditional news infrastructure has collapsed into social media platforms, where news, commentary, and livestreamed footage intermingle in our feeds. For younger demographics especially, this shift has created near-unlimited access to atrocity 3., fundamentally altering not just how we consume news but how we encounter global suffering³ by collapsing the distance that once existed between viewer and victim.
Our current news consumption may therefore contain several features that make it distinct from the past. The first is the collapse of context: older forms of news required active engagement—buying a newspaper, turning on the TV, loading a homepage. By contrast, news via social media often appears without our active engagement. A livestream of starving children may now sit between a post from a friend and an advertisement for a new face cream. This contextual collapse creates what cognitive scientists might recognise as extreme 'task switching'—the mental effort required to shift between different types of information processing. For example, the concept of 'cognitive load theory' suggests that our working memory has limited capacity for processing competing information streams4. When starving children appear adjacent to face cream advertisements, the brain might rapidly switch between moral evaluation, consumer processing, and social connection—a form of cognitive multitasking that research shows can be both mentally taxing and less effective than focused attention.
The second is the collapse of temporality. Previously, there were temporal limits on how much news one could consume: a newspaper ended, the evening broadcast concluded. Social media removed these boundaries. It is now possible to witness more atrocity in twenty minutes than a person might have encountered in a week’s worth of broadsheets. This temporal collapse makes atrocity feel ever-present, while offering little space for processing.
Finally, we are seeing a growing collapse of credibility, where real news is increasingly circulated alongside disinformation, meaning that in addition to constantly processing events we may perceive as morally atrocious, we also have to discern whether or not the information is real.
The burden of news consumption might therefore be understood as a collision of these three factors: collapsed context (real news mixed with personal content), collapsed temporality (no natural stopping points), and collapsed credibility (real and fabricated content interwoven). Crucially, because false information is effectively infinite—unlike real suffering or our capacity to process it—there is technically no limit to how much atrocity can be perceived by those who engage with algorithmic platforms.
In terms of processing these negative news cycles, one term that has gained particular traction is "compassion fatigue", defined as the state of physical and emotional exhaustion that can occur when individuals are repeatedly exposed to the suffering of others, or more colloquially, the "cost of caring."5. Responses include movements like digitarianism, where users actively choose to disengage with certain technologies (like vegetarians with meat) to mitigate any potential negative impacts.
Echoing public sentiment, the effects of exposure to negative content on mental health are increasingly studied by researchers6, with some studies showing that exposure to violent imagery can indeed reduce physiological and emotional responses over time7. However, isolating these effects remains methodologically challenging: negative content is interwoven with other social media material, making it difficult to measure news exposure independently or determine causation.
3. Trained for Stability: The 'Long Peace' as a Moral Operating System
Reflecting on my own sense of moral disorientation also brought to mind a generational factor about how specific moral and civic orientations may influence the degree to which the current state of affairs feels beyond comprehension.
Like many late millennials (or early Gen Z, depending on your cutoff), I grew up during what philosophers like Steven Pinker have called 'the long peace’: the relatively stable period following World War II when global conflicts reached historical lows and liberal democratic norms seemed firmly established10. Though Pinker's interpretation remains contested11, data confirms that deaths from armed conflict reached historic lows during the late 1990s through early 2010s12.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts-by-type
As a student during this period of relative global peace, I absorbed a particular civic worldview—one grounded in the idea of linear social progress—which shaped both what and how we learned about history. In my classrooms, certain truisms seemed inviolable: human rights were protected, genocide was unthinkable, and Western democracies would remain broadly centrist, with extremist politics consigned to the margins. I remember being told that the horrors of WWII had created a stable international system designed to prevent such atrocities from recurring. This worldview was reinforced during an exchange in Germany, where I encountered the phrase Nie Wieder—Never Again—a national commitment to preventing any recurrence of the Holocaust. One teacher even assured us that World War III would never happen. The lesson had been learned, and the memory of atrocity was too strong (and painful) for such events to be repeated.
To be clear, our curriculum wasn’t entirely ignorant: we learned about deviations from this post-war order (e.g., Rwanda, Bosnia, 9/11), but these were presented as exceptions. Like most of my peers, I internalised this framework: pro-human rights, anchored in linear progress, optimistic about the durability of liberal democracy. It became the moral baseline through which I interpreted world events.
These early lessons now feel particularly incompatible with the two most publicised recent conflicts: Ukraine and Gaza. Within my high school framework, two things were considered unthinkable: genocide and war in Europe. I believed this right up until I saw the tanks roll across the border, a moment that forced me to recalibrate my priors and reconsider what was possible in contemporary geopolitics. Gaza, similarly, has become harder and harder to reconcile with concepts like Nie Wieder—especially as videos of dying children circulate daily through our feeds.
While many of my friends have described similar feelings, this may be a generational anomaly. Older generations—Gen X and Boomers—lived through the Cold War and often have personal or familial memories of wartime threat. Gen Z and Alpha were raised on climate collapse, pandemic discourse, and ambient doom. Their expectations may be different, and I often find young people to have a kind of moral clarity my generation struggles to access, perhaps because they never experienced the same expectation mismatches.
So, how do we start making sense?
Collage: Sign of the Times
As public discourse increasingly adopts the language of psychological crisis, understanding the sources of moral disorientation may help us develop solutions. This means not only identifying the structural and cultural conditions that make sensemaking so difficult, but also considering the kinds of responses that might help re-establish moral clarity.
We might reframe how we interpret regressions in social progress. History is inherently messy, recursive, and contested—and as Hegel observed, it often advances through contradiction, with clashing ideas generating the tension necessary for new formations to emerge. Recognising reversals as part of this dialectical process does not excuse them, but it may make them more digestible—and in doing so, potentially reduce their cognitive toll.
We can update the way we teach civic history and political education. Rather than offering neat narratives of improvement, we should emphasise critical thinking, complexity, and reversibility, especially given that digital connectivity now makes intimate exposure to global atrocity inevitable.
Action is a well-practised antidote to cognitive dissonance, and research shows that moral discomfort can be reduced by taking even small, intentional actions13. Whether that means donating to mutual aid, attending a protest, or writing publicly about your values, acting in alignment with our concerns helps restore coherence between belief and behaviour.
In the face of regression, it may help not only to name what has gone wrong, but also to remember that people have faced similar ruptures before—and responded.
References
1. Haslam, N., Tse, J. S. Y. & De Deyne, S. Concept Creep and Psychiatrization. Front. Sociol. 6, (2021).
2. Bartholomew, J. First Thing: UN says 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in next 48 hours under Israeli aid blockade. The Guardian (2025).
3. Digital News Report 2024 | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2024.
4. Sweller, J. Cognitive load theory. in The psychology of learning and motivation: Cognition in education, Vol. 55 37–76 (Elsevier Academic Press, San Diego, CA, US, 2011). doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-387691-1.00002-8.
5. Sinclair, S., Raffin-Bouchal, S., Venturato, L., Mijovic-Kondejewski, J. & Smith-MacDonald, L. Compassion fatigue: A meta-narrative review of the healthcare literature. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 69, 9–24 (2017).
6. Anderson, C. A. et al. Desensitization effects of violent media exposure. Cyberpsychology 18, 45–62 (2024).
7. Bushman, B. J. & Anderson, C. A. Comfortably numb: Desensitizing effects of violent media on helping others. Psychol. Sci. 20, 273–277 (2009).
8. Bandura, A. Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves. xiii, 529 (Worth Publishers, New York, NY, US, 2016).
9. Arendt, H. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (Viking Press, 1965).
10. The Better Angels of our Nature. https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature.
11. The Darker Angels of our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History and Violence – book review. Counterfire https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-darker-angels-of-our-nature-refuting-the-pinker-theory-of-history-and-violence-book-review/.
12. War and Peace. https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#:~:text=Globally%2C%20close%20to%2080%2C000%20people,in%20the%20bottom%2Dright%20corner.
13. Bloom, P. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. (Random House, 2017).
Overton window shifted hella hard