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Three scenes. Different places, different people. One shared mistake.
The first took place at a university, maybe ten years ago. An amok alarm went off. No one knew whether it was a drill, a malfunction, or something real. I was older than most students, having arrived late to academia after years elsewhere. Instinct kicked in the way it used to: identify exits, move people, reduce risk.
What happened instead felt unreal. A group of young female social work students ran away from me laughing, giggling, turning the uncertainty into a kind of game. The alarm became background noise. The possibility of real danger was treated like a role-play nobody had agreed to, but everyone mocked anyway. It was later declared a false alarm. That detail is irrelevant. In real life, you never know that in advance.
New Year’s Eve in Switzerland, ten years later. A fire breaks out in a bar. Forty people die. Video footage later shows teenagers filming the flames instead of leaving. Phones raised, exits ignored, the fire framed neatly in portrait mode. Content was captured. Lives were not.
Again, the same pattern. Reality processed as something to be documented, not something to respond to. As if events were reversible. As if someone would yell “cut” before consequences arrived.
The third scene unfolded in the United States. A law enforcement operation. A woman intentionally blocks officers with her vehicle. She is ordered out. She refuses. The situation escalates. Shots are fired. She dies.
Afterwards, her partner screams in disbelief: “Why do you have real bullets?”
That sentence is the tell. It only makes sense in a world where force is usually symbolic. Where authority is something you argue with online. Where conflict feels like narrative, not physics.
Three contexts: a university hallway, a nightclub, a law enforcement confrontation. Different countries. Different stakes. One shared error: behaving as if real life were a simulation.
Call it spectator hesitation.
In an actual crisis, survival depends on milliseconds of recognition: this is real, this is now, this is me. The spectator mind spends those milliseconds elsewhere. What is this? What kind of situation is this? How is it framed? Is this for me?
This is not about video games. That explanation is lazy and mostly wrong. Games have rules. Limits. Consequences. You lose, you fail, you restart. Players know exactly which world they are in.
What is new is passive consumption.
The internet has trained us to witness everything without consequence. Deaths, disasters, humiliations, violence, all sliding past between ads and jokes. We watch people get seriously hurt, sometimes killed, framed as entertainment. Then we close the app and make dinner. Nothing happens to us.
Over time, expectations shift. The brain learns that shock does not require action. That danger is something you comment on. That distance is guaranteed. That someone else will handle it.
Yes, television existed before. But television had borders. You sat down. You watched the news. It ended. The internet erased the frame. War, pornography, comedy, outrage, self-help, all occupy the same endless stream. Reality no longer announces itself.
What emerges is not just behavioral confusion, but an existential split.
One group lives in a world of physics. Actions produce immediate, irreversible effects. The other lives in a world of narrative, where events come with explanations, comment sections, and replay.
When these worlds collide, when the narrative mind meets a bullet, a fire, or a collapsing structure, the result is not just tragedy. It is betrayal. The simulation did not protect me.
People who have faced real danger recognize reality instantly. Earthquakes, riots, war zones, serious accidents strip away irony in seconds. There is no audience. No performance. No time to negotiate meaning. You move or you pay.
What we are seeing now is a widening gap between those who still inhabit a world of consequence and those who unconsciously treat life as content. The former act early, decisively, sometimes bluntly. The latter film, joke, argue, or freeze, assuming intervention will arrive automatically.
This is not about blaming individuals. It is about recognizing a cultural condition we have quietly cultivated.
The fatal moment is not panic, it is hesitation. The pause where someone reaches for a phone instead of an exit. The second spent waiting for clarification that will never come. The instinctive search for a “Skip Ad” button on a reality that does not pause.
Alarms, flames, shouted commands are not prompts. They are the event.
The curtain was never there.
We have just been living as if it were.
And the most dangerous moment is the one where you still think there is.