The Black Sheep LIVE: Why You Need to Grieve WAY More

Salomé's livestream from January 10th, 2025

Technology has freed us from many painful things, but it has also divorced us from many meaningful things, like collective grieving. Social media and the 24/7 news cycle give us front row seats to every tragedy now, but we have no grieving process for secondhand sadness. While our experience of bad news about disasters, war, violence, and tragedies isn't direct, the normal response is still fear, anger, sadness, and grief.

For most of human history, people had rituals around these hardships that offered a cathartic way to make sense of the suffering and move on. The opposite is true on social media. Whereas people normally feel more connected to those they're experiencing a tragedy with, when we experience that tragedy via social media, we become more disconnected from each other, as debating and blaming take hold every time.

What happens to a person that witnesses a tragedy secondhand and feels the appropriate shock, anger, and sadness, but has no cathartic outlet?

What happens to a cul…