The Numbing of Humanity: Desensitization in the Digital Age And How Art Can Heal Us
By 2025, humanity imagined itself more advanced, more enlightened, more humane than its ancestors. Yet our daily reality suggests otherwise. Social media feeds are flooded with conflict and cruelty: wars live-streamed in real time, assaults filmed for clicks, genocides reduced to short clips, and even calls to broadcast executions as public spectacle.
What should horrify us often barely stirs a reaction. A swipe, a scroll, and the next post is waiting. This numbing effect, what psychologists call desensitization, is spreading.
Keith Haring, Untitled, Acrylic on vinyl tarpaulin, 180 × 180in, 1982 (Rubell Museum)
The Digital Colosseum
In today’s polarized digital landscape, dialogue has often been replaced by hostility, as though public discourse were a gladiatorial arena where winning matters more than listening. Political and social disagreements frequently escalate into finger-pointing contests, with far-right and far-left extremes reducing people to caricatures of their beliefs. The internet rewards outrage, and hostility is mistaken for debate. This erosion of dialogue doesn’t just fracture society; it strips individuals of empathy and the ability to engage meaningfully with differing perspectives.
Compounding this polarization is the constant stream of violent content saturating our feeds. Wars, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings unfold on screens in real time, and each replayed video risks numbing us to suffering. What was once shocking has become normalized. The more violence we consume, the less sensitive we become—not because people are inherently indifferent, but because the human psyche can only absorb so much pain before shutting down.The Cost of Numbness
Anselm Kiefer, Untitled, Charcoal, chairs, branches, and plaster on canvas, 2007. (Rubell Museum)
“People remembered all of the events in history only linearly and can only see from the vantage point of the present looking back or projecting forward. But they cannot see themselves in the present and interpret what an of these events have meant.”
Experts warn that this cycle has profound consequences. Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict, observes, “In every feud I’ve seen, from petty to geopolitical, the pattern is the same: people stop talking with curiosity and start talking at or about each other. The conflict takes on a life of its own.” Psychiatrist Moshe Reisner likewise cautions that repeated exposure to graphic media “desensitizes the brain’s natural alarm systems, making cruelty easier to dismiss and harder to resist.”
Together, polarization and desensitization create a feedback loop where empathy erodes, suspicion grows, and society drifts further into division.
The Cost of Numbness
Unchecked desensitization and polarization carry profound risks:
Erosion of empathy: Tragedy becomes background noise, less likely to spark outrage or action.
Mental health impacts: Constant exposure to conflict and hate fuels anxiety, depression, and compassion fatigue.
Moral drift: When cruelty is accepted as “just the way things are,” society risks losing its ethical compass.
If technology numbs us, what can awaken us again?
Art as the Antidote
Throughout history, art has been humanity’s most consistent response to violence and despair. It bears witness, sparks reflection, and restores connection. Picasso’s Guernica forced the world to confront the horror of civilian bombings. The AIDS Memorial Quilt transformed grief into activism. In each case, art re-sensitized us to suffering, refusing to let it become invisible.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt on Display at the National Mall in Washington D.C.
In today’s world, art is not just resistance—it is remedy. It brings back beauty, peace, and presence in ways that counterbalance the brutality of the feed.
Healing through creation: Art therapy, used widely with trauma survivors, allows people to process pain by transforming it into expression. A 2021 review in Frontiers in Psychology found creative therapies significantly reduced symptoms of PTSD and depression.
Restoring beauty: The Virginia Beach Correctional Center (VBCC) has a "Paint Crew" program where incarcerated individuals create murals on the facility's walls to improve the environment and provide a creative outlet for them
Global testimony: The Gaza Biennale (2025) features over 25 Palestinian artists whose homes and studios were destroyed. Their works are not only records of loss, but also acts of resilience, preserving humanity amid devastation.
Re-awakening reflection: In Switzerland, doctors are now prescribing museum visits to patients as part of mental health treatment. By engaging with beauty and creativity, people are guided back into feeling, reflection, and peace.
“Art reactivates our emotional centers,” explains art therapist Cathy Malchiodi. “It re-sensitizes us, reminding us that we are not meant to be numb, but to feel deeply.”
Photo by: Virginia Beach Correctional Center
When Art Itself Is Silenced
Even as art offers a pathway back to empathy, some governments and institutions respond with suppression. Around the world, artists who use their voices to challenge violence, inequality, or political corruption often find themselves silenced or censored.
From Ai Weiwei’s clashes with Chinese authorities, to exhibitions in Russia shut down for critiquing the war in Ukraine, to Palestinian artists having their work erased from global platforms, the message is clear: art has power. And because it has power, those in authority sometimes fear it.
Ai Weiwei – Study of Perspective, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, 1995
If art were inconsequential, no one would bother to censor it. But when a painting, a song, or a performance can awaken empathy, mobilize action, or threaten the narratives of the powerful, it becomes dangerous to those who thrive on division.
This suppression underscores why art must be protected, amplified, and defended. In trying to silence artists, governments reveal both the potency of creative expression and their own insecurity in the face of it.
Reclaiming Sensitivity
If social media desensitizes by flooding us with unfiltered brutality, art re-sensitizes by slowing us down. It asks us to stop, to look, to listen, to feel. It reintroduces beauty where there is ugliness, peace where there is chaos, meaning where there is despair.
This is not escapism. It is resistance. To create, to engage with art, is to insist that violence is not the norm—that beauty still has a place, that peace is possible, that empathy must endure.
Laurie Lipton, Primetime, charcoal and graphite on paper, 26 x 23in, 2026 (Copyright of Artist)
The Choice Ahead
We stand at a crossroads. One path is numbness: endless scrolling, violence and hatred reduced to content, empathy eroded. The other path is re-sensitization: leaning on art not as a luxury, but as a necessity.
Art gives us back our humanity. It softens what has hardened. It heals what has broken. And in a time when indifference is the easy option, it reminds us that the harder, braver choice is to feel.
Because if hatred numbs us, art awakens us. And in that awakening lies our best hope for bringing beauty and peace back into the world.