Today’s Thought, I’m Conflicted

A lot of people ask me what I do when I walk, which is varied (I did, however, lose my voice the other day from talking solely to myself, SO THERE). Usually, it’s followed by some variation of “don’t you get bored?”, “I could never do that?”, or “what’s the point of walking all day when you could just get a bus?” On the surface, I understand the question because I ask myself the same thing every ten minutes or so. It probably does look pointless: walking for eight hours, sweating through your clothes, carrying your life on your back, voluntarily giving yourself blisters that make you want to get your nail scissors out and saw your foot off.

But the truth is I think more when I walk than at any other point in my life and sometimes, if I’m honest, that’s not always a good thing.

I look around and everyone seems to romanticise these long walks. They talk about clarity, peace and some kind of spiritual enlightenment that has NEVER come close to finding me. I don’t want to be the buzzkill, but most days all I can think about is how my own thoughts are the hardest part of the journey. The physical suffering is easy. In a sick way, I love it because after a while you become numb to it. You’re like the Tin Man at the start, stiff and rusted, and then slowly you loosen up. The mental side is harder because there is nowhere to hide from it.

Anyway… Today’s thought.

I was somewhere in Portugal (I still can’t pronounce anything here), finally feeling disconnected from the world in the best possible way. I had Noah Kahan playing in my headphones. Orbiter… iykyk. I was looking at vineyards, dirt roads and absolutely nothing important for once. Then, like the addict I apparently am, I opened Instagram. A terrible decision. Not exactly what medieval pilgrims would have been doing.

Almost immediately, I saw two people I know had shared stories. One about Afghanistan. One about Palestine.

TO BE INCREDIBLY CLEAR, neither offended me, nor were they unreasonable or hateful. In fact, both reflected positions that most decent people would agree with. Afghan women should have access to education. Palestinians deserve safety and dignity. Neither of these statements should be controversial.

Yet for some reason I felt uncomfortable.

Not because of what was being said, but because of what it made me think about in my admittedly vulnerable state.

And this is where I start getting myself into trouble because I don’t actually know what I think. I’ve been wrestling with this since October 7th. Not the conflict itself, but the way we talk about conflict.

People SHOULD care. They absolutely should care. I wish they cared more.

People should question governments and challenge injustice. People should be allowed to publicly disagree with those in power and say it freely.

What I find myself struggling with is whether caring and understanding have become disconnected from one another.

What fascinates me is that we’ve somehow created a world where sharing an infographic for twenty-four hours can feel morally equivalent to understanding a conflict.

It’s hard because I can’t exactly sit here pretending I know much either. Just because I’ve spent time in some more “out-there places”, doesn’t magically place me higher up some intelligence hierarchy. If anything, the opposite has happened. The more I’ve travelled, the less certain I’ve become about almost everything.

What I do know is that it takes less time to open Instagram than it does to read a book. It takes less time to repost a slogan than it does to understand the history behind it. It takes less time to choose a side than it does to understand how that side came to exist in the first place.

And I genuinely wonder what happens when our opinions start forming faster than our understanding.

Because the irony of travel, at least for me, is that the more knowledge I’ve gained, the harder it has become to fit things into neat little boxes. Honestly, the more I’ve seen, the less I feel like I know.

Sometimes I wonder if the people who know the least are often the most certain, while the people who have spent years trying to understand something are the ones sitting there saying, “I don’t know, it’s complicated.”

I remember sitting in Afghanistan listening to people describe the exact same event in completely different ways. They weren’t lying to me, nor were they less educated. They had simply experienced the same reality through different lenses. History is messy, and so are our memories. Then there is identity, religion, culture, politics, personal experience, etc.

Social media ABSOLUTELY hates messy. It loves certainty because it performs well. It gets likes and shares and, in my opinion, it makes it far too easy for us to choose a side. It helps us feel like we’re part of something and makes complicated things feel simple.

Anyway, that’s my thought.

Why do people share a post, and what do they genuinely think it’s going to do? Is it to raise awareness? To encourage action? To show solidarity?

If we’re privileged enough to be sitting on the other side of the world with the time and resources to care about these issues, should that care extend beyond a repost and into something tangible, whether that’s donating, learning, volunteering or supporting organisations on the ground?

Then again, is simply showing you care enough? Part of me thinks it should be. Another part of me isn’t so sure (and then I feel like an asshole).