Nepal, Oct. 17 -- Adark, viscous trench of sludge is where our street used to be in Devighat. An elderly woman in a red sari paces a second-floor balcony with its concrete balustrade missing.

Laundry hangs from exposed rebars of a half-collapsed building. Men are having lunch on a crumbling ledge below an uprooted tree lodged in the floor above them.

These scenes were different from the visual grammar through which I had seen the disaster of my ancestral home online, in which the destruction arrived as a reel.

The Nepali psyche is drowning in 15-second floods of hopelessness. Local heartbreak becomes repeatable content, circulated through systems that measure our attention more readily than they understand our grief. Synthetic sympath...