World Disappear When You Close Your Eyes
You know that idea that the world disappears when you close your eyes? Well, believe it or not, it actually does. I’ve experienced it myself. I made this observation after two very careful insights. The first is my interactions with several international students, and the second is my excessive use of social media over the winter break (I know I shouldn’t have done that, but hey, now I can write this blog).
Okay, so before anyone gets offended, this is not my personal opinion. I’ve been told this by my local friends: most Hong Kong people don’t care about what is going on in the world as long as it doesn’t affect them directly. For instance, take the recent genocide that took place in Gaza. I’m sure most citizens are aware of it, but most don’t care enough to do anything about it. I searched on the internet and could only find one article on a protest about this issue. Sadly, that protest only had five people.
There is the other group of people that closely followed the genocide. Well, for these people, their primary source of information is most likely social media (yeah, trust me, nobody watches the news anymore). Social media serves you content algorithmically, meaning it learns your preferences through your interactions—what videos you like, what videos you comment on, if you re-watch a video, and several other factors. (If you’re wondering why, it’s because they have to keep you hooked on their platform; that’s how they make their money.) So, a person following the genocide will get more and more related videos.
Well, that’s exactly what happened to me. I followed quite a few accounts on X (censorship was too strong on other platforms) that were documenting the Gaza genocide (I’ll give the links to these accounts at the end of the blog. Viewer discretion advised!). Every single day, I would see uncensored pictures and videos of children, women, and men either under the rubble or blown to bits. I was so involved that I’m pretty sure I knew about every bomb drop in Gaza. I could feel the pain of these people. I could imagine myself being there, in their place. I’m not gonna lie—I shed tears watching these videos.
But then, eventually, it became too much. I was too scared to even open X. I was scared to see people being killed, to see their bodies decomposing. So, I stopped. For several weeks, I stopped following the genocide. I closed my eyes, and Gaza disappeared. To me, it seemed like things had cooled down, but in reality, they hadn’t mellowed out—maybe they’d even gotten worse. I don’t know.
And that’s just one issue. Suppose I followed food insecurity or suicide cases. Well, then my feed is going to be filled with images of hungry children and depressed individuals. From my perspective, all I would see in the world would be sadness. The opposite is also true. If I follow accounts that show, for example, oceans being cleaned and animal species being saved from extinction, my world would be full of happiness. I would see humans as kind and compassionate creatures.
I hope by now you get the point I’m trying to make. But I think we can’t really open our eyes to everything—we just can’t. Like, if we did, we’d be too full of sorrow, so demotivated by humanity that we wouldn’t be able to function properly in our day-to-day lives. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you can balance it out by following the good things in life as well. I know that this conclusion not the satisfying, happy conclusion that you may have been hoping for, but I guess it can’t be. Anyways, I hope I’ve proven my point that, the world does disappear when you close your eyes. So say open your eyes to things that really matter. How will you know what truly matters? Well I’ll that for you to figure out.
P.S. → Here are the X accounts that I mentioned earlier. I reposted a bunch of images and videos, you can have a look at those as well.