Are We Allowed To Enjoy Things While Gaza Is Starving?

I am struggling with what we are supposed to feel during an atrocity.

So here’s what’s happening, in Gaza, right now: people—entire families, infants, elders, pregnant women, toddlers,—are starving. Being clinically, systemically deprived of food. Not just by neglect or bureaucratic incompetence or some vaguely worded “crisis” but by the deliberate design of a military siege. Over a million people are in “catastrophic” food conditions, per the UN, which translates to: it’s happening and it is almost over because everyone will die.

This is not invisible. We know. We’re watching it. In real time. People are documenting their own starvation in Gaza so that maybe the governments of the world will give enough of a shit to stop it. (Spoiler: the world, so far, largely does not.) Those governments that could intervene are, at best, “monitoring the situation” and at worst actively funding the machinery of this mass deprivation.

The rest of us are left in this dizzying moral vertigo where the scale of the horror outpaces the tools we’ve been given to understand it.

Even the word “feed” makes this absurd. I see starvation on my “feed.” I am being fed horror. Palestinians are being fed nothing. The language collapses under the weight of its irony. An algorithmic buffet of grief, takes, and tragedy labeled as a “feed,” while actual human beings die from the absence of food. What kind of moral hallucination are we living in, where I scroll past videos of emaciated children while someone I follow just "has to try" a $20 Erewhon smoothie? The word “feed” is a grotesque jok that implicates all of us who can still consume content while others are being denied the basic conditions of life. And yet I keep scrolling, because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to do: metabolize atrocity as media, feel a sharp flash of shame or sorrow, post a story about it and wonder how many followers we might lose.

There’s this old line from Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. It is always relevant but especially now, when forgetting doesn’t happen slowly but almost in an instant, in a torrent of novelty: meme, movie promo, sports trade, celebrity breakup, press conference, war crime, baby photo, Coldplay kiss cam. Our hearts are breaking not just from the scale of the suffering but from the speed at which it is obscured.

And this is where it gets weird for us. Because I still do eat breakfast. I still laugh at stupid jokes. I still send memes to friends, still sit on the porch, still feel some small flicker of joy when the afternoon light comes in just right through the blinds, and then I feel a pang of something—I don’t know what exactly, guilt? shame? despair?— because how dare I enjoy anything while this is happening. I’m posting all the time about a life highlight (debut book release) and suddenly I’m paralyzed by the feeling that I need to append a disclaimer to every moment of beauty: by the way, Gaza is starving. As if joy is only permissible when sufficiently footnoted by horror.

It’s like I’ve internalized this idea that awareness must come with sufficient performance. That unless I’m constantly naming the catastrophe, I’m complicit. And maybe that’s not wrong. Maybe complicity is our default now. But the harder part is realizing that no amount of guilt will feed a starving child. That no caption, no caveat, no algorithmically boosted moral anguish will undo what’s being done. Still, I keep wanting to name it. Not to cleanse myself, but to make my small corner of the world a little more honest. Even if it makes people uncomfortable. Even if it makes me uncomfortable. Because discomfort, at this point, seems like an incredibly small price to accept.

The deeper question is not whether we’re allowed to enjoy things while Gaza is starving. The question is: what do we do with that enjoyment?