The other morning, barely awake as I waited for my first coffee of the day to brew, I stood in my kitchen and scrolled through Instagram on my phone. It’s hard to imagine – short of, say, knocking back a double brandy or laying out a lavish line of cocaine on the kitchen counter – a worse way I could have spent the first moments of my day.

In the minutes it took for the coffee to make its way from filter to pot, I witnessed a terrible and lurid array of aggravating things. I saw a scuffle between two middle-aged German men, one of them an Alternative for Germany representative trying to lay a wreath at a memorial for the failed assassination of Adolf Hitler. I saw the British journalist Lewis Goodall cornering a conservative influencer about her description of gay men as “degenerates”. I saw a Reuters video of police in New Delhi caning protesters demanding the resignation of India’s education minister. I saw the Australian politician Barnaby Joyce briefly interrupting a television interview to roar “SIT DOWN!!” at his dog. I saw a standup comedian humiliate a heckler in a not especially funny way. I saw a clip of the tennis player Kamil Majchrzak signing a hat for a young fan at the 2025 US Open only for the child to have the signed hat snatched from him by a grown man standing beside him.

These weren’t the only things I scrolled through in those minutes, of course. There were also bits of live performances from summer festivals, snippets of old comedy sketches I have seen a hundred times, and people giving different kinds of dubious fitness and diet advice. But what really made an impression was the sheer proliferation of scenes of conflict and aggression I was watching on the screen in my hand. And as each such scene materialised and dissipated, like fleeting images in a violent........

© The Irish Times