That Jada and That Will Love
By Amrit Singh (UG 25)
In one part of the world, a war rages. Across continents, Jada and Will Smith’s tumultuous relationship takes a turn. In a time of deep crisis, why do we care so much about the latter?
For the particularly sadistic ones of us, this may be a result of ‘schadenfreude’, a German term referring to the joy felt in the misfortunes of another person. Will and Jada Smith’s relationship has, in the past, been romanticized while also being subject to scrutiny for accusations of infidelity, the famous Oscar slap, and most recently, Jada Smith’s interview in which she admitted to being separated from her husband since 2016. As our feeds are flooded with gory videos from the Israel-Hamas War and Jada Smith’s interview, why do we pay so much attention to the personal lives of a celebrity couple? John Portmann, in his book, ‘When Bad Things Happen to Other People’, argues that schadenfreude occurs in smaller, manageable situations wherein we do not have to consider the ideas of ethics, in contrast to more serious situations that require us to think about the justice, fairness and morality of the suffering of other people. Thus, the viral nature of the interview, even as a war goes on, can be explained in terms of how easy it is to process the ‘suffering’ in either situation.
Furthermore, there is also a ‘psychic numbing’ that is taking place in our reactions to the war, which presents to us a tragedy spanning millions of people. Research has shown that we are able to empathize with individuals more easily than with groups of people. Jada and Will Smith present us the former– they are two individuals who are easily recognizable and whose story one has potentially followed for years. In comparison, the news about the war presents deaths as a function of numbers, rather than of individuals with lives of their own. Thus, it may be easier to focus on Will and Jada’s situation of romantic turmoil than to focus on a large-scale humanitarian crisis. A similar type of desensitization occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, wherein the response to the death toll turned to numbness as the number of deaths rose on a massive scale.
Ultimately, the news one reads, or what one’s social media feed looks like, depends largely on each individual and also what media outlets and social media algorithms choose to promote. However, it is important to understand our own behavioral mechanisms of processing the news that we see and whether we choose to ignore the suffering of a large group of people simply because a viral interview is easier to process, and focus on, emotionally. We must recognize that the casualties of a war are not just numbers, they are people with their own stories– people who must not be ignored simply because their stories have not gone viral or are not well known.
