To Be Mindful Does Not Mean to Be Tone Deaf

 Rafi Nursyamsi Darojat (30802400032)

    Curate your feed the way you'd curate a diet. It sounds sensible, even healthy. Cut the junk, keep what nourishes you, protect your peace. As a general principle about information overload, there is wisdom in it. But a diet is a choice only for people who can choose. Some people don't curate their bad news. They breathe it, drink it, and live inside it. When the haze is outside your window, there is no setting that filters it out. Advice to adjust your algorithm, however kindly meant, treats their reality as content, and content can be muted. Reality can't.   

That is the gap between mindfulness and tone deafness. Mindfulness means seeing clearly what is in front of you, and that includes the people who can't look away. A version of it that only teaches us to trim our discomfort is not awareness, but a more refined way of not looking. If mindfulness is truly about being aware of the world around us, then it must extend beyond our personal comfort and acknowledge the suffering of others.

Three things separate the two. First, who is speaking to whom: advice built for someone with the luxury of logging off lands differently on someone without it. We must recognise that not everyone has the same privilege of distancing themselves from a crisis. Second, what is being filtered: if the "bad news" is only a mood, filter it. If it is someone's life, filtering it out means ignoring them. Turning away from suffering does not make that suffering disappear; it only makes us less willing to acknowledge it. Third, what comes after the rest: calm should refill our capacity to care, not replace it. Taking a break from distressing news is reasonable, but that break should allow us to return with greater compassion, not permanent indifference.

Of course, people need rest, and nobody should be shamed for protecting their mental health. The point isn't to demand constant anxiety, but to say plainly that the power to step back is not equally distributed, and a mindful voice should say so out loud. Rather than simply scrolling past suffering, we should make an effort to understand it, acknowledge those affected, and consider how we can contribute, however modestly, to their well-being.

Be mindful, by all means. But let your awareness include the people whose news you can't unsee.