how desensitised have you become?

Robsweezie

Reading grim stories in the paper, seeing them on the news, people dying in car crashes, murders, random stabbings, assaults. I find myself almost numb to them, like they've become a daily accepted part of life, that people will die and that's that. It's a defence mechanism I've built up to avoid becoming too emotionally caught up in individual cases. I give these stories a moment's notice, sigh, express my condolences and move on, grateful it wasn't me. How do you process all the tragedy and brutality of the world? Do you still feel affected or do you "switch off"?

4zn76tysfajdxp

Robsweezie wrote: »

How do you process all the tragedy and brutality of the world? Do you still feel affected or do you "switch off"?

Turns me on, if anything.


Mmmmm... misery.

Tony Beetroot

I have enough problems myself without taking on the worlds ones.

Mint Aero

I think it's normal to be "desensitised" to these things as you put it. Otherwise you're a cotton wool wrapped candy cane not exposed to anything to be desensitised to yet. Sure people be sword fighting and brawling to death over a cup of tea little over a century ago and you wouldn't bat an eyelid. No point getting too soft in a so called civilised world. Best keep your toes in the pie.

MightyMandarin

You want desensitized? Go on /b/ on 4chan for an hour and it'll scare you how desensitized you'll become to seeing the weirdest, most disgusting sh*t out there.

beks101

I think it's a pretty important survival mechanism. If you walked around devastated at every tragic story you heard/read/watched on the news, you'd be pretty crap at this whole living thing.

I work in a newsroom so I have no soul and measure the scale of tragedy by how many westerners died and how badly that is going to affect my working day.

Robsweezie

MightyMandarin wrote:

You want desensitized? Go on /b/ on 4chan for an hour and it'll scare you how desensitized you'll become to seeing the weirdest, most disgusting sh*t out there.

Like what??? Not sure I want to look :-o

Fleawuss

It's Gods mysterious will. Allah Al akbar. Shanti Shanti Shanti. Krishna. Om. Etc etc etc.

MightyMandarin

Robsweezie wrote: »

Like what??? Not sure I want to look :-o

D*cks; lots and lots of d*cks. Some gory sh*t too.

Personally, I don't think it's too bad, but that's probably because I've been on there too much. There are some very, very weird people on there.

Ally Dick

I have always viewed life as an inexplicable bonus. Therefore I am quids in already. I can't wallow in the misery, even though I sympathise with people who are having problems

fleet_admiral

Had a shower a couple of hours ago so I feel pretty sanitised, thanks for asking op

Nunu

MightyMandarin wrote: »

You want desensitized? Go on /b/ on 4chan for an hour and it'll scare you how desensitized you'll become to seeing the weirdest, most disgusting sh*t out there.

**** sake! Had a gander there. Gif of some poor bloke on a subway track. Never again!

john the one

Very desensitized. Can watch all sorts of **** anytime of day.

Mind you I felt a Lil sick seeing Marilyn Manson ****ing Juice in sons of anarchy.

bodice ripper

Comfortably.

Stinjy

I think with the amount of news of this kind it's normal to be desensitised to seeing it on the news but you wouldn't be if you saw it first hand ...
If every horrible news story affected us we'd never watch the news...

eternal

Robsweezie wrote: »

Reading grim stories in the paper, seeing them on the news, people dying in car crashes, murders, random stabbings, assaults. I find myself almost numb to them, like they've become a daily accepted part of life, that people will die and that's that. It's a defence mechanism I've built up to avoid becoming too emotionally caught up in individual cases. I give these stories a moment's notice, sigh, express my condolences and move on, grateful it wasn't me. How do you process all the tragedy and brutality of the world? Do you still feel affected or do you "switch off"?

With the advent of technology, people have become more immune to world horror. Going back to the 1980s and X rated movies, these would be scoffed at now. Pornography is widely available to anyone with internet access whereas before it was the local lads with the 'dirty mags'. Atrocity has become widely publicised to the point where babies being raped mentioned on journo links on Facebook have smartass teens tagging each other with smiley faces. We have to cushion ourselves against the constant devastation by creating a humour or ignorance towards it. The truth of society has become synonymous with consistent barbaric happenings. Such major sociological events as The Holocaust would have been censored mainly in papers and on broadcasts during the War. It is only now that we realise the effects of these occurrences and try to reason it with discussion and thought. It is only after that the realisation really sinks in.

catallus

Nunu wrote: »

**** sake! Had a gander there. Gif of some poor bloke on a subway track. Never again!

God bless 4Chan!

jacksie66

This post has been deleted.

crazygeryy

Most things i can tolerate but rarely can i tolerate abuse to animals or stories of it.

Balmed Out

Used to be fairly desensitized but since we had our first kid im a whimpering emotional wreck. I have the turn the tv channel if there's a story about a sick or dying child, cant handle it.

hairyslug

I move on from everything fairly quickly (as long as it doesn't personally affect me)
But i dont go searching the net to look for weird **** to freak me out

Grayson

Depends on what you mean by desensitized.
I've seen some messed up stuff on the web. I won't go looking for and will actively avoid stuff like beheading videos.

At the same time I don't avoid news. I read a couple of papers a day. And I am horrified by what's happening in the world. I'm always shocked when I see people with a "Fcuk em" attitude to people who are floating in the med, or have ebola or are starving in africa.

The lack of empathy of some people is what shocks me the most.

mocha please!

Nunu wrote: »

**** sake! Had a gander there. Gif of some poor bloke on a subway track. Never again!

There's worse on Boards. I can't link as I'm a "new" user, but try searching for "man hit by train nsfw" ... That f*cked me up for life. Utterly desensitised to everything after that.

Massimo Cassagrande

I think were kidding ourselves. We've become (here in the first world anyway) massively sensitised to almost everything - imagine rounding up a gaggle of current 19 year olds and sending them off to fight in the trenches of ww1 for example, or asking your average metropolitan hipster to slaughter a chicken for his dinner..or go to burn and pillage the neighbouring village and bring back both their heads and their women...they would, yeah..

Maybe on the "looking at upsetting stuff on a screen" front we're desensitised, but I doubt there has ever been such a generation of handwringing mollies on many other fronts. Confront most people with a blocked toilet these days and you'll soon see how sensitive we've actually become...

redbel05

Had you asked me last week, I would have totally said yes, I am desensitized to other peoples misery. But then I witnessed a cyclist getting knocked down by the car in front of me while driving home from work. He was badly bruised and concussed but ok in the end. However I was completely shook by the whole incident and it has played on my mind every time I get in the car since.

Adamantium

Massimo Cassagrande wrote: »

I think were kidding ourselves. We've become (here in the first world anyway) massively sensitised to almost everything - imagine rounding up a gaggle of current 19 year olds and sending them off to fight in the trenches of ww1 for example, or asking your average metropolitan hipster to slaughter a chicken for his dinner..or go to burn and pillage the neighbouring village and bring back both their heads and their women...they would, yeah..

Maybe on the "looking at upsetting stuff on a screen" front we're desensitised, but I doubt there has ever been such a generation of handwringing mollies on many other fronts. Confront most people with a blocked toilet these days and you'll soon see how sensitive we've actually become...

I might print this out for my sanity. We're so inoculated it's so ****ing ridiculous. More importantly when something terrible happens we don't know how to deal with it.

You just want to tell them "get over yourself and stop ignoring your own problems". People let it fester and incubate.

PizzamanIRL

I see the headlines as "X kills Y amount of people using Z" and I feel for them and move to the next page without reading it. I see it so often I don't want to read it. I don't want negative news, especially about stuff that happens so often and that I basically can't do anything about it.

So yeah I've become a bit desensitized.

jacksie66

This post has been deleted.

Kwiecien

2001. The year i turned from semi cynic to full on disaffected.

9/11, 3 pals died in seperate accidents, mother in law had a heart attack, 2 of my husbands aunts died, foot and mouth disease, etc. I was involved in a car accident that year but luckily nobody was hurt.

Now I'm a good bit older and nothing really upsets me on the news. We were shown dying children on tv back in 1984, i asked my mam would santy bring them food and she didn't answer. i knew there and then at 8 years old the world was a bad place full of lies.

Tsunamis, earthquakes, floods etc, while tragic, i never shed a tear.

Brancott

The trick is to let Comedy/Sport Relief record for a good hour before hitting play.
That way you can FF x30 through the real life sob stories & actually enjoy the thing.

Malari

I don't think I was ever sensitized to start with.

catallus

I happened upon this elsewhere and I think it captures the essence of this thread, it's from "You Remind Me of Me", by Dan Chaon

He had read somewhere that babies are instinctively drawn to faces, that they will fixate even on drawings or abstract, facelike shapes, and round objects with markings that might resemble eye-mouth-nose. It was information that struck him as terribly sad, terribly lonely - to imagine the infants of the world scoping the blurry atmosphere above them for faces the way primitive people scrutinized the stars for patterns, the way castaways stare at the moon, the blinking of a satellite. It made him sad to think of the baby gathering information - a mind, a soul, slowly solidifying around these impressions, coming to understand cause and effect, coming out of a blank or fog into reality. Into a reality. The true terror, Jonah thought, the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die, but that we were all born, that we were all once little babies like this, unknowing and slowly reeling in the world, gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn't exist and then, through no fault of our own, we had to.

bnt

As you get older, I think you do have a certain distance from events, which can be a good thing. You learn that prevention is always better than cure, for example, and that it helps to think about consequences before you act. When I read about migrant boats sinking in the Mediterranean, my thoughts don't go straight to "save the migrants", since any saving that can be done has already been done, and those who have died can't be brought back. So what can we do? We can stop it from happening again, preventing deaths, by tackling the reasons why migrants take to boats in the first place.

Does that mean I'm desensitised about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean? They weren't forced on to the boats - they chose to get on, and in several cases the boats sank after they all rushed to one side when they saw a rescue ship on the horizon. Compare the numbers involved with what happened on December 26, 2004: close to a quarter of a million people died in one day, through no fault of their own, after that massive earthquake off the coast of Indonesia and resulting tsunami. When Stalin commented on the difference between a tragedy and a statistic, I wonder just how serious he was?

Pumpkinseeds

I'm pretty much desensitised to most things I see on tv, except anything that involves animal suffering.

silverfeather

I am not desensitized probably the opposite not that it's a good thing. I can take things too much to heart. I am a sensitive person.

I think though if you react like everything is happening to yourself then you don't really have true perspective. It's not your tragedy. If you felt more about the news then people around you or even the same that would be just weird. That would be weird fake sensitivity.

I could probably be more distant. It does not make people less kind or good as people. Infact they can be more useful in some ways.


I guess I am more desensitized than I realize I don't know ..is there a test I can take???

silverfeather

I just thought of something. True sensitivity may not actually be gushing emotion but perception and understanding filtered through experience.

Gushing emotional reactions are not always sensitive to a situation they are just extreme reactions to it.

I used to be able to watch the news and be relatively unaffected, or watch violent movies and tv shows and it would be just a way to pass the time, but lately I'm more affected than I ever was before and I've no idea why.

I was watching a tv show a few months ago - I think it was The Following - and a man was being tortured in some sadistic way, and I just felt ill. I don't know how I ever watched this stuff for entertainment. Since then I find myself choking up when I hear of ISIS's latest atrocity, or earthquakes wiping out families. I'm all out of the stuff that makes it possible to watch or hear of bad things and then forget about them. I can barely get through the news, and I'm a news addict. Adverts for children or animal charities stay with me in a way they never did before. I can't even read most thrillers anymore without it lingering. I think I'm a bit broked, and I'd like to be a bit more desensitised, but I think the opposite problem is more true of society in general.

BoJack Horseman

I've seen the very worst that ISIS have put up online.

But if I see a headline/link regarding animal cruelty, I'll rarely bring myself to click.

RDM_83 again

I think if your doing something as a job/encounter a bit you get used to it and just get on with what your doing, was recently on a site with a lot of baby skeletons and its a bit grim if you sit back and think about it but it doesnt serve any purpose being morbid, for a more extreme example a causality or palliative care medic can be surrounded by people dying bad day in day out but the ones I've met have been nice well balanced fairly happy people.
There's enough work in life trying to do your best to those you can and not hurting those you can't without taking the world on your shoulders.

Agricola

Very. I never follow murder, rape, criminal cases in the media because I don't give a fúck not to put too fine a point on it. It's obviously awful for the people involved and their families but it has no impact on me personally, I dont know them, and unlike a lot of Irish people, I dont get off on misery. I always skip this stuff in the paper, and read about the latest economic calamity, political debacle and sporting spectacle. That about does me.

Menas

I thought I was fairly desensitised until a buddy told me that he watches those beheading videos. Why the fck would anyone want to watch those?

silverfeather

Trigger Happy wrote: »

I thought I was fairly desensitised until a buddy told me that he watches those beheading videos. Why the fck would anyone want to watch those?

I have seen one video of two men being beaten and another I am not sure of the origin of. Both shocked me I was not expecting them. I think i try to avoid those Isis things now.

But in the middle ages seeing those things in real life would have been common executions were very public.

I think desensitization is a tool of the tyrant in non democratic societies. Stop feeling=stop objecting.

TheBeardedLady

I don't know. I'd say not that much.

I don't watch any gore or violence whatsoever, real or fake. Don't watch horror films, fast forward films if they get violent, don't watch beheadings on Youtube. If I see any of that stuff at all, it distresses me and I can't handle it at all.

But I've been around the block and have family and friends who've been through really awful stuff that I first heard about when I was very young, so non-gory stuff that might shock others wouldn't be as shocking to me.

It's one thing reading it in a paper about strangers and another thing seeing it happen in front of you - I can't imagine ever being desensitised to the latter.