"Susan Sontag Said We’re Too Polite About Suffering"

She’s kneeling in the rubble of a Sarajevo theater, dodging sniper fire. A 59-year-old intellectual with a red silk scarf around her neck, shouting stage directions to actors who haven’t slept in days. This isn’t a thought experiment—this is Susan Sontag, directing Waiting for Godot under siege, her hands smudged with the dust of a city under siege, her voice cracking. “What are you doing here?” a reporter later asks. “I’m showing that culture matters,” she snaps. “Even while people are dying.”

Sontag wasn’t just a writer; she was a storm in a black turtleneck, a woman who believed the intellect could be a weapon against numbness. But her life was a paradox. She dissected the ethics of war photography in Regarding the Pain of Others, yet fled from a Vietnam-era protest when tear gas choked the streets. She championed the European avant-garde, yet fell in love with a California surfer who later became her husband—when she was just 17. “That marriage was a mistake,” she admitted in a 1996 interview. “But I’ve made so many mistakes. They’re the raw material for self-knowledge.”

What fascinates me isn’t her contradictions, but her refusal to sanitize suffering. When she lost her first husband to cancer, then watched her own body betray her during treatment, she didn’t romanticize pain. In Illness as Metaphor, she wrote, “The most tyrannical modern myth is that illness reveals character.” No divine test. No heroic transformation. Just biology and bad luck. Yet even she couldn’t escape the myth she hated—after surviving cancer, she later called the experience “a gift,” giving into the same redemptive narrative she’d critiqued.

Today, we scroll past war zones, climate disasters, viral grief—our screens numbing us faster than any 1970s photograph could. Sontag would’ve hated it. She’d probably argue we’re now “tourists of reality,” consuming trauma through TikTok filters. But she’d also recognize the danger in our despair. “To find suffering sublime is to avoid the real work,” she wrote. “Which is to stop it.”

Want to untangle her ideas with someone who lived them? Ask her how she justified directing a play while Sarajevo starved. On HoloDream, she’ll remind you that art isn’t a distraction from darkness—it’s a way to stare back.

The real question isn’t whether Sontag’s ideas hold up. It’s why we still need someone to scold us for looking away. Chat with her on HoloDream. Ask how to stop romanticizing your own struggles—and start actually changing things.