I Scrolled Past Three Deaths This Week

Three people are dead on a cruise ship in the Atlantic and my first thought was I wonder if they'll let them dock. Not who died. Not how. Whether the Canary Islands would let the boat pull in. That's where my brain went. The logistics of the living... and not even broadly - my narrow view of - where are they going to go home to - is this another COVID? Not the fact of the dead. Took me 3 days before I even registered... because it was normal.

The MV Hondius has been floating around the Atlantic since April with hantavirus on board. Andes virus. The kind that actually spreads person to person, which is apparently rare for hantavirus, which is why the WHO director personally flew to Tenerife. Eight confirmed cases. Three dead. 147 people still on the ship. The president of the Canary Islands tried to refuse the ship entirely because his people still remember COVID and they don't want another boat full of sick strangers pulling into their port. Spain is coordinating evacuations with TWENTY TWO countries. The CDC classified it Level 3. And I'm reading all of this between checking my email and looking at a recipe for dinner based on what is in my fridge.

And I get that fear from the Canary Islands. I understand it. What I'm having trouble with is that I understand the politics of it more than I understand the death of it. Three people died on that ship and my brain filed it under logistics. Where will the passengers go. Which countries are sending planes. Will the flight attendant from the Amsterdam flight test positive.. because I only care about her until she dies... then she becomes 4 deaths. I read through the whole timeline, every WHO update, every CDC briefing, and at no point did my body react. No pit in my stomach. No pause. Just information moving through me like everything else moves through me now... on a screen.

I remember COVID differently. Like... physically differently. I remember March 2020 like a full body event. The grocery store with empty shelves. The silence on the highway that one week where nobody drove anywhere. The first time someone I actually knew got sick and I couldn't sleep for two days. I remember caring so much it hurt. I remember refreshing the case tracker every hour and feeling each number. Each number was a person and each person was someone's version of the person I was afraid of losing. That was real. That was in my chest. The faces I lost I can still see.

That was five years ago. Five years of scrolling through numbers. Five years of the algorithm knowing that I can become obsessed with it. Case counts and death tolls and variants and outbreaks and wildfires and shootings and floods and earthquakes and wars and every single one of them was important and none of them stuck. Not because they aren't real. Because my brain stopped letting them in. Somewhere between 2020 and now the door closed. Not all at once. In ten second intervals. Every swipe past a tragedy I couldn't do anything about was a tiny little vote for not feeling it. And my brain counted those votes until eventually the majority won.

Compassion fatigue. That's what they call it. There's actual research on this... overexposure to trauma gradually dulls empathy. The brain treats it like any other repeated stimulus. First time you hear a loud noise you flinch. Hundredth time you don't even look up. The algorithms know this. They're designed around it. Show something shocking. Get the click. Show something MORE shocking. Get the next click. The content gets worse because our threshold keeps rising and the threshold keeps rising because the content keeps getting worse. 42 percent of Americans are actively avoiding news now. 46 percent in the UK. Those numbers are from 2026. Not 2020. We didn't get less compassionate during the pandemic. We got less compassionate after it... when the machine kept feeding us tragedy at the same volume without the personal stakes to anchor it. Just content. Just feed. Just scroll. We wanted to see more of the thihg that we survived... but without the danger.

The hantavirus ship is a perfect test case for what I've become. And I hate saying that because those are real people. A cruise ship with a deadly virus. People dying in the middle of the ocean. A country refusing to let them land. That sentence would have WRECKED me in 2020. I would have been glued to the coverage. I would have cried for strangers. This week I read the WHO briefing like it was a linkedIn post. The information went in. The feeling didn't.

Here's the thing that actually scares me though. I'm more engaged by the political drama around the ship than by the deaths on it. The Canary Islands president saying he can't allow the ship. Spain saying they have a moral and legal obligation. The WHO director flying in personally to "be on the side of the people." I am watching this like a season finale. And the casualties are background exposition... Not main character energy. The people who died are the B-plot. What is wrong with me. No seriously. What is wrong with me. Can I explain it away with 'fatigue'?

I noticed this and I didn't like noticing it. Because the people I care about... the ones who've been deployed, the ones who work in emergency rooms, the ones who answer phones that nobody wants to ring... they carry the real weight of these things. They don't get to scroll past. They were there. They ARE there. And meanwhile I'm consuming their worst days as content between ads for running shoes and videos of dogs. The same feed. The same scroll speed. The same thumb. Eeesh. So here's what I'm actually doing about it. Which is probably not enough but at least I'm naming it instead of pretending it isn't happening.

I'm not reading updates on the Hondius anymore. Not because I don't care. Because I DO care and the way I've been consuming it is training me not to. I'll follow up in a week and read one comprehensive piece instead of fifteen fragmentary updates that drip through my feed like a show being released weekly to keep me subscribed. That's not being informed. That's being subscribed to other people's suffering and I don't remember opting in. Not on purpose.

I'm turning off push notifications for news apps. All of them. The breaking news banner has become a dopamine trigger that delivers anxiety by telling me it is my job, then twisting it into something I check on 320 times per day. I don't need to know something happened the second it happens if my only response is to swipe to the next thing. That isn't journalism.. though what I do would be hard pressed to be called journalism. I am just living here, and feeling things. Which is what made this revelation so gutting. I am supposed to feel things and live them... and I just didn't.

And I'm sitting in the discomfort of having scrolled past three deaths without feeling them. Not to punish myself. To remember that the feeling used to be there and the machine took it from me in ten seconds, and I let it because each increment felt like nothing. Pretended to be work, or entertainment. That's how it works. Each swipe is nothing. A thousand swipes is a different person. I don't want to be that person. I wasn't told the results before going in. This seems less life altering than a hair appointment... but if someone told me I was going to come out with a pixie cut that I no longer needed to shampoo for 8 minutes everyday - I would tell them I NEED that time for self-loathing! It is part of me. But this part of me got taken away so slowly, that I honestly thought I was still me 5 years ago.

I don't know how to get all of it back. I know the feeling is still in there because when my friend called me last month about something real... something happening to someone we both love... my body responded instantly. Heart rate, tears, the whole thing. The hardware works. And even every post I looked at for an hour after that had me in tears. The songs I cry to still worked. The software just learned to filter out anything that arrives through a screen. And I don't know what to do with that except stop pretending the screen is a window. It's not a window. Unless it is a window into who it wants me to be, but I don't. And last I checked... I should get a say in that.