'I've been watching something ugly grow in my generation. It's time we talked about it.'

If you want to support independent women's media, become a Mamamia subscriber. Get an all-access pass to everything we make, including exclusive podcasts, articles, videos and our exercise app, MOVE.

This article is an edited version of one that originally appeared on Maisa Alexandra's Substack. Sign up here.

I've been watching something ugly grow in my generation for a while. It started small. A video forwarded here, a screenshot there, a joke made a little too close to real pain.

At first it feels isolated. Then it becomes a pattern. And at some point you realise it isn't random anymore. It's culture.

I want to talk about that culture. About how casual cruelty has become. About how numb we are to real people and real events. I want to talk about how we've turned other people's worst moments into something we pass around on our phones.

To talk about that honestly, I need to mention something that happened in my demographic recently. Even mentioning it makes me uncomfortable. It feels like I'm in danger of doing the exact thing I'm criticising, like I'm turning that tragedy into a writing prompt.

But I'm not trying to.

I'm not looking for a grief aesthetic or a moment of moral clarity. This isn't about my feelings or my epiphany. It's just that pretending it didn't happen would feel dishonest, because it's exactly the kind of event that exposes who we've become.

Watch: Struggling with the loss of a loved one? Check out this clip on how to deal with the pain. Post continues below.

There was a heaviness in the air. Six kids died in my town. A car crash. A fire. The kind of tragedy that makes your stomach clench before your mind even catches up. None of them were my friends, but I'd crossed their paths in that loose, small-town way. A party. A mutual friend. A moment of recognition at a mall.

Until yesterday they were people with lives, habits, inside jokes, group chats, futures.

Now they're gone.

As the news spread, there was that silent panic math. Checking group chats. Calling friends. Refreshing Instagram stories. Praying that the name of loved ones wasn't one of the six. There's something brutally communal about those minutes before confirmation, a whole community holding its breath at once.

And then, just as the shock was settling, photos began circulating. Real photos. Not just of the wreckage. Not of the aftermath. But of their bodies. Burned beyond recognition. Carbonised in their seats.

Something no stranger should ever see. Something that the families should never have to know exists, let alone stumble upon in groupchats. Yet there they were, flying across town at the speed of gossip.

I saw a few. I didn't want to. I didn't ask to. Now it lives somewhere in the back of my skull like a splinter.

I keep thinking about their parents. About the moment someone might have opened their phone and been confronted with the worst possible image of their child. How their last memory is now contaminated by an image that should have been protected, held back, shielded. I think about how terrified I would be to see someone I love in that state, reduced to something unhuman. There are no words for that. It's a violence that goes beyond the physical. It's a violence of memory. And the fact that this image was passed around like gossip? That part feels like a wound of its own.

It made me think about how far we've drifted from the old instinct to cover the body, to shield the eyes, to protect the dignity of the dead. Once, communities knew there were things the living shouldn't witness.

Now we live inside a camera roll with no guardrails.

It started small, a video forwarded here, a screenshot there. Now we live inside a camera roll. Image: Canva.

Somewhere along the way, boundaries dissolved. The margins of empathy blurred until everything became content. Privacy stopped being a right and became a courtesy. Moments that should be protected are now converted instantly into something shareable, something shocking enough to earn a reaction. Not necessarily out of evil, but out of that modern reflex: if I saw it, you should see it too.

And what unsettles me the most is how casual it is and the strange pride some people seem to feel while doing it. As if being the first to send the photo, the first to "confirm," the first to drop the most gruesome detail somehow grants them a weird victory. The digital equivalent of standing on a rooftop and screaming, I knew before you did.

There's something deeply human about wanting to feel connected during tragedy, but something deeply warped about wanting to feel important because of it.

We've gotten too comfortable collapsing real lives into content. We turn people — breathing, laughing, annoying, complicated people — into posts. Into engagement. Into a momentary spike in impressions. And once you start seeing lives as headlines, it becomes easy to forget that behind every headline is a mother whose ears are ringing, a friend who can't swallow, a sibling answering the same question for the fiftieth time.

We've seen the trendification of tragedy happen in real time. People making TikToks about tragedies that aren't theirs. People performing a kind of sloppy, public mourning for audiences of strangers. Not out of real connection, but out of the instinct to insert themselves into the narrative. To be seen being affected. To mark themselves as relevant to the moment.

Everyone wants to add their two cents, even when the jar is already overflowing. People who had no connection to what happened suddenly feel compelled to react publicly. Not to offer actual comfort, not to help, but to stay visible. To stay part of the conversation. It's like silence has become suspicious. If you don't post, you don't care. If you don't perform concern, you must not have any.

It's wild, and not in the poetic sense. Wild in the unhinged sense.

It's crazy how desensitised we've become. How easily we balance devastation in one tab and self presentation in the next. How someone can post a death notice in the morning, share their brunch in the afternoon and squeeze in the classic "dear friends, please drive safe" message before uploading a video of themselves popping champagne. All of it stitched together with their outfit of the day. The seamless shift from loss to aesthetic. The way sorrow becomes a brief detour before the regularly scheduled content returns.

It feels like we've collectively forgotten that some moments deserve a pause. A little respect. Not performative grief threaded through curated highlights.

Tributes make sense when they come from the center of someone's life, from the people who held their secrets or their hand or their dreams. But when someone who spoke to the victim once at a party suddenly posts a photo carousel with a paragraph about "how fragile life is"… it becomes less about grief and more about proximity Olympics.

There's a name for that phenomenon. Grief Olympics. The race to claim the closest seat to tragedy. The sudden rush to scroll through thousands of pictures to post a blurry group photo from 2022 at a house party because you drank with the victim once and now want the world to know that you're devastated too. So you can caption the post: I can't believe this. Life is so short. Hashtag broken heart. Hashtag rest in peace.

It's emotional opportunism dressed up as compassion.

Listen: How to stop your phone from f***ing up your life. Post continues below.

And the worst part? It muddies the waters for the people who are actually grieving. It drowns out the voices that matter. It turns someone's life, and someone's death, into a momentary spectacle.

And then there's the part that annoys me in a different way. The collective morality parade that always appears after tragedy. The "hug your loved ones tonight" captions. The "don't drink and drive" recycled advice. The inspirational quotes about life being short. I understand awareness. I understand safety. I understand good intentions. But the timing is awful and the energy is self serving.

It's like clockwork. A tragedy happens, and people start performing moral clarity as if grief were a stage and they're auditioning for the role of Most Responsible Citizen. The way people slide seamlessly from someone's death into their own anecdote about a time they "almost crashed with the deceased driver last summer?" It's tone-deaf at best, self centered at worst.

For fuck's sake Jessica, I do not want to watch you turn someone else's death into your personal cautionary tale. Take that performance elsewhere. Write it in your diary. Tell your group chat. Anything but another black and white Instagram story under the guise of public service.

What I'm sick of, truly, viscerally, is the performance. The immediate rush to package tragedy into something sharable and meaningful. Something that makes you look thoughtful and concerned and wise. Something that makes you feel involved. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is shut up. Sit with the discomfort. Sit with the fact that something awful has happened and nothing you post will redeem it.

Grief doesn't need your commentary. Loss doesn't need a hashtag. And respect sure as hell doesn't need to be aesthetic.

There has to be a way back to tenderness. To silence. To choosing not to post. Real grief doesn't need an audience, and respect doesn't require proof.

Underneath all of this, the gore-sharing, the grief Olympics, the moral theater, is something real and ugly. A generation that mistakes visibility for virtue. A generation that thinks feeling something is only real once it's posted. A generation that has forgotten the sacredness of restraint.

There are things we never need to say. There are moments we're never supposed to see. There are tragedies that deserve privacy. There are families who deserve gentleness. And there are boundaries that should never be crossed in the name of curiosity or clout.

If anything, losing touch with our own capacity for care is the real tragedy of my generation. We've become so used to witnessing pain through screens that we've started adopting the logic of the screen: fast, numb, reaction-based, and forgettable.

Maybe the real mourning will start when we learn how to look away again.

This article is an edited version of one that originally appeared on Maisa Alexandra's Substack. Sign up here.

Feature Image: Instagram/@maiisaalexandra.