I reposted the infographic and went back to eating dinner.
It was a Wednesday, and the news was breaking. Gunshots at the Philippine Senate. People were told to take cover. A senator evading an arrest warrant, armed soldiers in the hallways, and a building that was supposed to mean something. I read the notifications while my food was getting cold. I tapped the repost button and then I put my phone face-down.
I finished lunch like nothing had happened.
Within the hour, my feed had transformed. Prayer emojis. Reposted pubmats. Statements from organizations, from public figures, from accounts I'd never interacted with. People were sharing the same headline in different fonts, the same outrage in different captions. The Senate was on lockdown and the internet was performing in real time.
I am not here to cancel any of it. I was part of it too.
But there is a specific guilt that comes not from doing nothing, but from doing just enough to feel like you did something. A repost. A prayer emoji. A story repost with the little ribbon sticker. Four seconds. No cost. And afterward, the quiet permission to feel like a person who cares.
But I've been sitting with the discomfort of what I actually did that Wednesday—and what I didn't. I never read past the headline. Never looked up what the ICC warrant actually said, or why it was issued, or what it meant that soldiers were inside a Senate building. I felt a spike of something—alarm, maybe, or the social instinct to signal that I had seen it—and then I moved on.
And the thing is, I know I am not alone in this.
To be fair to ourselves, social media has genuinely become the fastest way we know how to respond. When something breaks, we share it—not always because we think the repost will change the outcome, but because silence feels like complicity, and a pubmat is the fastest form of protest available. There is something real in that impulse. The frustration is real. The solidarity, even when expressed through a story repost, is not entirely hollow.
But somewhere between genuine political concern and the performance of it, there is a line—and it has gotten very easy to stop noticing where it is.
We have built an entire structure of digital concern. Infographics designed for reposting. Captions that make it easy to say the right thing quickly. Outrage that arrives ready to be shared without the inconvenience of actually sitting with it. The structure is so smooth now that engagement feels like action, and action feels like enough. We reshare a breaking news pubmat and log it as participation.
What I keep returning to is the fact that I reposted because I wanted to be the kind of person who reposts. Not because I had anything real to offer. Because I wanted my feed to reflect a version of me that was present, engaged, and politically aware. I wanted the record to show I had been here.
That is not nothing. But it is also not enough.
I finished my dinner that Wednesday. The food had gone cold, and I ate it anyway, and by the time I was done, the news had moved and my feed had moved and I had moved, and nothing about me was different. I had reposted. I had shown up, digitally. I had done the thing.
I want to sit with things longer than that. To let the crisis be a crisis before it becomes a caption. To let the anger stay anger long enough to ask what it actually wants from me.
The prayer emoji is not the prayer. And caring about your country cannot begin and end with the four seconds it takes to tap repost.
Next time, I want to actually stay. I hope you do too.
