One morning, everybody stopped commenting. Nothing extraordinary had happened. The week before, the month before dead air. No bombs, no breaking news demanding our outrage. Just normal. Perversely normal.
Kids readied for school. Markets opened. The Stock Exchange buzzed. Everything moved as it always moved.
But we had already been dying. Not the acute kind that announces itself the chronic kind that seeps into marrow. Silent. A cancer you don’t feel until you’re already hollow.
We knew something was wrong. We couldn’t place our hands on it, couldn’t name this sickness. But we carried on. That’s what it means to be human, we told ourselves. We always move on.
We moved on from wars. We moved on from COVID. We moved on from the crash of 2008. We moved on from everything. We’re perfect at this. We’ve mastered the art of forgetting.
But this thing this parasite it moved differently. It fed on our dopamine, our outrage, our endless need to be seen. Every post, a sugar cube dissolving in the bloodstream of a dying animal. Every reaction, another needle in the vein. Every swipe, every share, every furious comment we were the meal and the mouth, consuming ourselves.
We learned to live with it. Like we learned to live with everything else that kills us slowly. We thought this was just what it meant to exist chronically online, chronically tired, chronically dying.
Until that morning.
A post was made and never recommended. Nobody reacted. Nobody liked it. Nobody commented. The reels played to empty rooms. The headlines scrolled into silence. No top feed. No trending. No algorithm deciding what deserved our rage today.
We stopped.
Not dramatically. Not with screams or protests or locked doors like before. We just… stopped caring. The feeds kept running but nobody was watching. The notifications pinged but nobody heard them.
That’s what happens when you die inside. When you’re so tired you don’t even know you’re drowning anymore. When the exhaustion becomes so complete that even scrolling feels like too much.
We all died that day. Together. Quietly.
And when we died when we finally stopped feeding it —the parasite died too.
That’s the thing about parasites. They need the host to survive. But sometimes the host has to die first. Sometimes you have to hit absolute zero before you can tell the difference between breathing and suffocating.
The day everybody stopped commenting was the day we died.
It was also the day we woke up (I Hope so).
This is the promise of the future.