The Way We Live: Have We Started Applauding the Wrong People?

By: Chioma Madonna Ndukwu

The Way We Live: Have We Started Applauding the Wrong People?

“Abeg tell them make dem come Enugu next.”
I remember pausing when I saw that comment under a livestream I had opened without expecting anything serious.

More comments kept appearing, and what struck me was not just what people were saying, but how easily they were saying it. Some were laughing. Some were tagging friends.

Some were dropping account details under discussions linked to known kidnapping cases. Others were openly asking for attention as though it was part of a giveaway.

And then there was that word again and again, “cruise.” At first, I tried to treat it like noise, something people say online without thinking.

But the longer I stayed on the screen, the more uncomfortable it became, because somewhere beneath all that engagement were real lives that never appear in those comment sections.

There are fathers who have sold land to raise ransom money and are still trying to recover from the loss. There are mothers who still check the gate instinctively when it creaks at night.

There are families who have borrowed money they cannot repay just to bring home someone who never came back alive.

None of that was present in the space I was looking at. What I saw instead was attention being directed elsewhere, not at the victims, but at the people connected to their suffering.

It did not feel like crime was new. Crime has always existed. What felt different was how quickly it was being absorbed into entertainment.

This is not limited to one place. In parts of Nigeria, similar content moves through social media spaces where jokes and danger sit side by side without clear separation.

In Mexico, cartel-related content sometimes circulates in ways that give violent groups a kind of digital visibility they once did not have.

In parts of the United States and Europe, online spaces have also struggled with the way violent individuals or fraudsters attract attention, sometimes even admiration, through viral content.

The pattern is not identical everywhere, but the direction is similar. Crime is no longer only feared in some spaces; it is increasingly observed as content.

In that same online environment, someone wrote:
“If dem no give us money, we go support am.”

Another person responded almost immediately:
“Na cruise, relax.”

What unsettled me was not just the statement, but how fast it came. There was no pause. No reflection. No sense that something was being crossed.

The South African humanitarian, Desmond Tutu once said:
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

But what happens when neutrality is no longer silence? What happens when it becomes participation dressed as humour?

Because many people would never openly support harm. Yet online, they interact with it in ways that slowly remove emotional distance from it.

The strange part is that most of those same people would not find it funny if it happened near them.

If it touched their own families, the tone would change immediately. The laughter would disappear. The word “cruise” would lose meaning.

But screens make other people’s pain feel far enough away to consume without consequence. And over time, that distance changes how we respond to suffering.

In different parts of the world, researchers have raised concerns about how repeated exposure to violence online can reduce emotional sensitivity, especially when that violence is packaged as content or humour.

In cities like Lagos, Nairobi, London, and Tokyo, young people are growing up in digital environments where tragedy, entertainment, crime, and comedy appear side by side, competing for attention in the same scroll.

And slowly, what once demanded empathy begins to compete with amusement instead.

The Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka once warned that silence in the face of wrongdoing is a form of complicity.

But in this age, complicity is not always silent. Sometimes it is active, visible, and publicly engaged. A comment, a reaction, a joke, a share, a trend.

What worries me most is not that people see these things. It is how quickly they adapt to them.

Because when adaptation happens too fast, moral shock begins to fade. And when moral shock fades, even things that should feel wrong begin to feel normal.

Meanwhile, outside the screen, the consequences remain unchanged. Families are still rebuilding after loss. Parents are still waiting for children who never returned. Lives are still being shaped by decisions that others now discuss casually online.

And those lives do not refresh like content. They remain fixed in the aftermath.

The deeper danger is not just exposure to crime. It is emotional distance from it. A distance that allows suffering to be consumed without feeling its weight.

And once that becomes normal, society begins to lose something it cannot easily recover, its instinct to feel for others.

Moral:
A society does not lose its humanity in one moment. It loses it gradually, when people begin to engage with human suffering as entertainment instead of pain.

What we choose to laugh at, share, or ignore eventually shapes what we become comfortable with. And once empathy begins to weaken, even the most serious wounds in society start to look like content.

Comment Hook:
At what point did we stop feeling the weight of other people’s pain while watching it on our screens?