There’s pollution, violence, volcanic ash on my screen. And yet an email is more stressful

Years are quietly being stripped off my lifespan, and somehow that doesn’t ruin my day. But getting scolded for one careless word in an email? That can send me spiralling.

Representational image | Pixabay

I stepped out one morning into this scene: Delhi was wrapped in a thick, grey shawl of smog, the kind that softens the outlines of buildings and sharpens the ache in your throat. Masks were back, not as a pandemic relic but as a seasonal accessory. There were reports of volcanic ash in the air—yes, volcanic ash—carried across continents, an unwelcome reminder of the fragility of everything. And as I sat in an auto, watching the city blur through pollution, my first instinct wasn’t despair or panic. I wasn’t worried about these large problems. What plagued me was a mistake I had made in an email the day before.

Years are quietly being stripped off my “average human lifespan”, and somehow that doesn’t ruin my day. But getting scolded for one careless word in an email? That can send me spiralling.

But that disconnect, between the catastrophic and the trivial, is more common than I realised. It’s not apathy. It’s not a moral failure. It’s simply how our minds cope with living in a world that demands an impossible emotional bandwidth from us.

Psychologists call this feeling ‘cognitive dissonance’: the tension between knowing the world is burning and still worrying about everyday problems.

When everything is a crisis, nothing feels like one.

And there’s a coping mechanism called the ‘spotlight effect’, where your mind zooms in on the things that affect you directly, even if they are small. This isn’t denial; it’s survival.

Ambient catastrophe

We live in a time when the emotional toll of global bad news has quietly reshaped how we feel, think, and react. Every day brings a fresh wave of climate disasters, political turbulence, humanitarian crises, or violence—all of it streaming directly on our phones. 

This overload creates compassion fatigue: a gradual numbing of our ability to care deeply about every single issue, because the alternative is emotional burnout.

It’s impossible to hold all the world’s suffering at once, so our brains triage. They narrow our focus to what feels manageable: the inbox, the deadline, the familiar stress of office life. Not because these things matter more, but because they’re the things we can control.

This also brings the familiar sense of guilt for not doing enough. For years, I blamed myself for what I thought was selective activism. I would rage about climate injustice but scroll past other horrors. I would read obsessively about Gaza, then take breaks when the grief overwhelmed me. I would worry about political regression and the normalisation of authoritarianism, yet in the same breath, would feel anxious about someone spoiling the season finale of Stranger Things.

But I now realise that this selective sensitivity, this ebb and flow of attention, is itself a human response to emotional overwhelm.

We are living through an age of what some call “ambient catastrophe”, a time when crisis is always in the background—never fully addressed, never fully gone. And it creates a strange emotional climate: part resignation, part numbness, part hyper-vigilance.

So all I can really think about is that one email. I can’t seem to let go of it.

But I am also realising that focusing on an email over the distant, vague suffering of the world is also a form of unconscious self-compassion.

Tending to the small, immediate fires of our personal lives—a mistake at work, a tense conversation with a friend, a day of self-doubt—gives us structure. It allows us to stay functional enough to eventually face the bigger issues with clarity, so we don’t collapse under the weight of everything everywhere all at once.

Yes, the world is burning. And we’ve had to adapt to keep living in it.

We can acknowledge the surreal dissonance of caring deeply about both the smog and the email. We can accept that our minds aren’t built to hold every catastrophe at equal emotional weight. And we can still choose, when we have the energy, to direct our attention toward the global problems, one small, meaningful action at a time.

In the end, the fact that we continue to care at all, even through exhaustion and numbness, is proof that we haven’t given up on the world. And all is not lost yet—a Zohran Mamdani wins an election somewhere, and suddenly the world becomes a place of hope.

Views are personal.

(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)