I have a confession to make... For a long time now, I’ve been feeling something strange. It isn’t depression or sadness. It’s something I can’t explain, and I don’t know when it began. When I told a friend about it, they said they felt exactly the same way. I thought it was a coincidence, until I realized that we were all carrying the same bitterness. You see them wandering the streets, walking as though they’re going somewhere, but you can’t tell whether they’re thinking about something or simply walking because they have to. Nothing sparks their curiosity anymore. Nothing surprises them. Someone might read the first line of a news story about an entire family being killed, put their phone away, and ask how much a kilo of tomatoes costs. There is nothing surprising about that anymore. I think about everything we’ve witnessed over the past three years, the faces we memorized before losing the people behind them, the images we’ve learned to scroll past, and the news stories we no longer bother to finish reading. I remember how we once mourned tragedies that had nothing to do with us, like the tragedy of Rayan, the Moroccan child. How did we become so accustomed to the news of our own deaths? My God, what has happened to us? In the tents, people don’t have the luxury of stopping. They must search for water in the morning, find a way to afford food, count what little money remains, and worry about what they’ll do if one of their children falls ill tomorrow. A grief that never ends. We’ve grown tired of complaining, too. We already know what others will say, and we know we’ll repeat the same words tomorrow. The tents will remain tents, and what we’ve lost won’t return simply because we talk about it. So silence feels like the lesser harm to our hearts. Two weeks ago, I asked an eleven-year-old boy selling tissues in the market why he wasn’t going to school. He looked at me and said: “And even if I went to school, what would change, sir? My mother and I wouldn’t find anyone to feed us. How would you and your education help me then?” I didn’t know what to say. Damn it, he was right. At eleven, he had already learned that feeding his bedridden mother, the only person he had left, mattered more than school, his future, or his dreams. But there’s something else we rarely talk about. Even when you decide to speak about your pain, you hesitate. You begin telling your story, then remember that the person listening has lost their home and family, or endured something worse than you have. So you shorten your story and say you’re fine. Everyone wants to talk, but who has any room left to listen? Two friends might sit together, each desperate to speak, only to exchange the same familiar question: “How are you?” They give the answers they’ve grown accustomed to giving and leave, while the words they came to share remain trapped in their chests. I’ve given this phenomenon a name: **“Herd Numbness.”** I don’t know if the name is accurate, or when all this began. I only know that we’ve seen too much, lost too much, and been forced to keep living, even on days when we weren’t sure we’d make it through. For a long time, I’ve felt something strange. And whenever I try to understand it, I look around and realize that everyone else feels it, too. I don’t know whether we’ve grown accustomed to what happened to us, or whether we simply no longer have the strength to feel it as deeply as we should. I don’t know if this unsettling silence brings relief, or if words themselves have nowhere left to go. All I know is that we are no longer who we used to be. And the strangest part is that when I look around, no one seems surprised.