Exponential Apathy

You could say it’s been an eventful season for our political circus. Emotions have been stirred on all sides for one reason or another. Yet, I feel absolutely nothing. I honestly don’t care anymore about any of it. I have become apathetic to our government as a whole.

I see people virtue signaling daily for their party’s ideals, and I couldn’t care less. I know what you’re thinking: “This (insert policy or event) affects us all, how are you not outraged?” Truthfully, what does any of it matter anyway? We can shout from the rooftops about offenses—perceived or actual—and nothing will change. Any time I’ve raised my voice in opposition or support, I’ve just ended up hoarse.

The bigger issue I have is the overall noise online. Social media is a cesspool of indignation and self-victimization on all sides. Again, who cares? My apathy and indifference may be a privileged position, and I am fully aware. I just don’t have the emotional bandwidth to care about the plight of humanity anymore. I can pretend—like many of you so vehemently do online—that I’m moved by this or that event in the news cycle. But in the end, if it’s outside of my three-foot radius of influence, I’m unbothered by it. So, I don’t add to the static on the internet. If something is within that sphere of influence, I address it on my own accord, and you’d likely never know about it.

This likely makes me a bad Christian, American, Veteran, or whatever other adjective you’d like to attribute to me. That’s okay. I have nothing to prove. I think, in many ways, we’ve feigned passion for things we aren’t actually passionate about so many times that nothing seems to rise to that level of importance anymore. It’s like our culture is the boy who cried wolf so many times that we won’t recognize real threats even when canine teeth rip into our flesh. We’ve become desensitized to tragedy because we are so inundated with it. We have developed compassion fatigue. At least, I know I have.

So, how does one combat these feelings of complete disconnection from societal collapse? Being invested in a particular community or group can often help with feelings of apathy and cultural detachment. I’ve found the more I isolate myself from real human connection, the more the noise online can affect my mental health. I imagine unplugging from the source of discontentment will help assuage any ill effects derived from my devices.

Then I think, if I unplug and remove myself from it all, will these weekly posts continue? Should I be complicit in stoking an algorithm that favors content creation over substance? Do my words or thoughts even matter? I wrestle with that weekly. I wonder many times, as I scrawl these half-cocked ideas, if my voice rises above the cultural noise or if what I have to say even matters in the grand scheme of the world at large.

Time will tell. All I know is that we are the most connected and equally isolated we’ve ever been in history, and it can’t be good to receive so much information daily.

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Stan Lake is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker from Bethania, North Carolina. His work has been published in Reptiles Magazine, Dirtbag Magazine, Lethal Minds Journal, Backcountry Journal, Wildlife in North Carolina, SOFLETE, The Tarheel Guardsman, Wildsound Writing Festival, and others. His poetry collection “A Toad in a Glass Jar” is scheduled for publication in late fall 2024 by Dead Reckoning Collective. He has written three Children’s books and one Christian Devotional book. He filmed and directed a documentary about his deployment in Iraq with the Army called “Hammer Down.” He spends most of his free time wrangling toads.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.