Maybe I'm missing the writer's thrust, but I feel like compassion fatigue among the general population has been a problem long before social media or the internet. Take homelessness for example....
Maybe I'm missing the writer's thrust, but I feel like compassion fatigue among the general population has been a problem long before social media or the internet. Take homelessness for example. It was a problem long before the internet and has continued to be the same moral nightmare that it has been for a very long time. We haven't done the obvious thing and eminent domained unused land into low-income or even free housing. Even the laissez-faire solution of private charities and shelters has not solved this seemingly unchanging and interminable problem. We still accept that the speculative value of a vacant property outweighs the desire of someone to sleep under a roof. We believe that it's acceptable for a hotel room to go unused for a night rather than let someone stay in it for less than the market rate. We tell ourselves that the person huddled under a tarp or surrounded by shopping carts either wanted to live that way or deserved to live that way, as though that might absolve us of the sin of allowing another human being to live that way.
Is compassion fatigue inevitable? Compassion fatigue is already happening. It was never just unique to caregivers, or doctors, or nurses, or emergency workers. We have had compassion fatigue for the homeless for a long time and the results of that are predictable and all around us. I don't see our compassion fatigue towards victims of shootings, or victims of war, or victims of drug addiction, having any better outcome.
Does compassion fatigue matter? Yes it does. It should matter to all of us all the time. Complacency to human suffering should worry us no matter the context.
Wanted to start by saying I agree with your post and that it's well worded. Personally, though compassion fatigue matters, I just don't see how anyone can be "on" all the time. This is something...
Wanted to start by saying I agree with your post and that it's well worded.
Does compassion fatigue matter? Yes it does. It should matter to all of us all the time. Complacency to human suffering should worry us no matter the context.
Personally, though compassion fatigue matters, I just don't see how anyone can be "on" all the time. This is something I've been dealing quite a bit with relatively recently as I tried to be more environmentally friendly, more specifically heading towards zero-waste. There's just so much, and I've only picked one of many causes.
Without basically "solving world hunger" level changes, the individually can only tackle a small part at a time.
I get this. I understand the logic and feeling that it is impossible to empathize 100% to everything without breaking down, but I think it's too easy to fall into a trap just turning our empathy...
I get this. I understand the logic and feeling that it is impossible to empathize 100% to everything without breaking down, but I think it's too easy to fall into a trap just turning our empathy off. Maybe I'm being too preachy, but I had an epiphany a few weeks ago that revealed to me what happens when I leave my empathy machine off for too long.
I was stopped at a cross walk and a person who is homeless made eye contact with me from across the street. Instead of returning the eye contact or even doing nothing, I moved so that the traffic light pole broke the line of sight between me and them just so that I wouldn't have to feel that suffering differential. I could have done anything else besides what I did, but I didn't want to feel bad. I was so complacent in my world that I essentially erased them from my reality rather than feel even a fraction of the suffering that I'm sure she had been dealing with in a much deeper and profound way. It wasn't until much later when I reflected on how much of a garbage human being I was to that person who didn't even ask me for anything but just made me uncomfortable in my bubble.
Maybe it was too much to propose that people keep their empathy machines on all the time -- it was definitely too much. But at the very least people should make sure that it can still run -- and if it doesn't I think one should really reflect on how they themselves in relation to all of the people around them.
I do absolutely get this. Not long after Trump was elected, I basically stopped following the news, any news. And really it wasn't until Tildes that I started listening to the news in the morning...
...but I think it's too easy to fall into a trap just turning our empathy off. Maybe I'm being too preachy, but I had an epiphany a few weeks ago that revealed to me what happens when I leave my empathy machine off for too long.
I do absolutely get this. Not long after Trump was elected, I basically stopped following the news, any news. And really it wasn't until Tildes that I started listening to the news in the morning and reading it at breaks again.
It wasn't until much later when I reflected on how much of a garbage human being I was...
I get this too, but I want to say - you're not. I think the fact that you stopped to think about him afterwards says something. Empathy is more than one moment.
I've held back on responding for a long time because I wasn't sure how best to do so, but I've decided that complacency to human suffering is the only reasonable option. Why care, when it's...
Complacency to human suffering should worry us no matter the context.
I've held back on responding for a long time because I wasn't sure how best to do so, but I've decided that complacency to human suffering is the only reasonable option. Why care, when it's obvious that as long as we preserve the existing social, political, and economic order nothing will ever change?
We could make the world a better place right now. We have the resources. We have the technology. What we don't have are leaders willing to either lead or get the hell out of the way. Instead, the powers that be profit from the way things are, and actively impede efforts to improve the status quo.
This is why poverty persists. This is why the climate is changing. This is why none of us have a future.
This made me think of a quote from the movie Ever After that's something like "I use to think if I cared about anything, I would have to care about everything". I have always thought that was a...
This made me think of a quote from the movie Ever After that's something like "I use to think if I cared about anything, I would have to care about everything". I have always thought that was a bit how I felt about the issues that surround us. It's interesting to learn there's a really term for it.
Also this, before I really need to stop... taking care of ourselves is the precondition of taking care of (a small part of) the world. I'm learning this lesson again and again.
Also this, before I really need to stop... taking care of ourselves is the precondition of taking care of (a small part of) the world.
I think the author described different kinds of compassion fatigue, each in a different context. The fatigue of a caregiver (painfully experienced by herself) and the numbing or even apathy...
I think the author described different kinds of compassion fatigue, each in a different context.
The fatigue of a caregiver (painfully experienced by herself) and the numbing or even apathy induced by media saturation, they're similar, but the contexts are different.
I remember a discussion about the latter in Erich Fromm's 1941 book The Fear of Freedom, so it's definitely not a recent concept. Fromm wrote that the mass media (radio, newspaper) eroded the media consumers' sense of tragedy. When disaster, war, and suffering were juxtaposed with the inane, the empty, the silly, the "clickbait", the advertisement, the propaganda -- and repeated ad nauseam in the daily churn of the industrial society -- the passive consumer became even more passive, and less likely to believe in other people's suffering. And apathy is an important ingredient in authoritarianism.
The consequence of depleted compassion is devastating. It's not merely the difficulty to muster the efforts to give care, the erosion of motivation. It strikes at our belief in our own capacity to be compassionate and to act in a helpful way. It breeds learned helplessness, which in turn beckons other ills. It attacks our core self.
I've got interested in one detail in the article.
And third: “If you are still feeling burnt out emotionally, look for a tragedy closer to home.”
This referred to a therapist's solution to compassion fatigue. The author's own experience with this wasn't positive, as she was already burned out caring for her ill husband. "Everyone has their own local tragedy," she wrote.
I feel that when the author wrote it, she meant it, and it was understandable. But I think the therapist's might have some different context in mind.
What some people forget, but what Milgram himself emphasizes, is that people’s obedience to instructions to deliver high-voltage shocks was very much contingent on the relative distances of the victim and of the authority issuing the instructions. If the victim was near at hand and the authority far away, almost no one complied. If the authority was nearby and the victim neither visible nor audible, almost everyone complied.
I think the therapist's context might have been closer to this, also from that article:
Think and you will get it, Mencius says. Take the heart that is over here and apply it over there. Note how you react in the nearby, vivid cases; then note, intellectually, the lack of relevant difference between those cases and more distant, less vivid cases. For Mencius, this attention to the natural impulses of the heart, and the rational extension of those impulses, is the key to moral development.
Distance appears here a double-edged sword.
It's entirely natural and human that we extend compassion more readily when the other is nearer. By being mindful in the nearby scenarios, we develop a resilient morality. When the other is far away, abstract, symbolic, mediated by the mass media that devours the message, we're more prone to apathy and its consequences. It seems in the latter scenario, what gets us is the feeling of inability. A compassionate emotion arises in us, but is frustrated by the distance. At this moment of vulnerability, the media immediately fills the void by distraction, because it's flood of information is infinite, and its constant surveillance knows what does the job the best. In this loop the media makes money, thereby making itself more effective in enforcing the loop.
However, a persistent dedication to a near cause is hard, too. The suffering of the nearby one, repeated without end in sight, depletes us unlike by the impenetrable, obstinate media. It's the time, the wear, the absence of end in sight. Instead of leaving one pent up, it sucks one dry.
The author wrote
I have reached the point where being shocked feels normal; it is a fact I hold in my mind but don’t feel in my body. I would like to follow the guidelines of self-care, to preserve my “emotional endurance”, not as a professional caregiver, just as a regular person who cares about the world. So I take breaks and try to reduce my stress. I go out with friends, I watch old poker tournaments on YouTube. But my breaks are getting longer. They feel dangerously close to avoidance.
How true the ambiguous feeling! Perhaps we can never be sure of our exact boundary. I felt that as the author articulated her difficulty, to confront it as a writer, she was also trying to get more grip on this feeling of certainty that she felt was slipping away.
It was really difficult for her to do this, to analyse the depletion while depleted. This alone, as I see it, is a testament to her character and something I can't express clearly, something like "liveliness".
This was really interesting. Thanks for this perspective. Though the concept of compassion fatigue has been around for a while, I do feel our sense of time and distance, which affects our ability...
I feel that when the author wrote it, she meant it, and it was understandable. But I think the therapist's might have some different context in mind.
This was really interesting. Thanks for this perspective.
Though the concept of compassion fatigue has been around for a while, I do feel our sense of time and distance, which affects our ability to care, has changed with modern technology. Time comes to us in shorter bursts, while distance becomes at times negligible. We have a lot more to care about in a shorter time frame, which maybe causes the fatigue faster?
Maybe that's the case. I don't know. And I don't know if distance got diminished by the modern ways of communicating. Psychological distance, I'm afraid not, especially in the current for-profit...
Maybe that's the case. I don't know.
And I don't know if distance got diminished by the modern ways of communicating. Psychological distance, I'm afraid not, especially in the current for-profit mainstream social media and its ecosystem. This beast... I feel in it there's the potential of distorting everything. A thick, dense fog, with nightmarish topology and geometry.
Maybe the origin of compassion has something very territorial about it, something connected to land, tribe, neighbour. It may sound in-group selfish this way, but with reason and spiritual yearning, a natural tendency to pour out, it grows out to become the greater compassion, the ren of Mencius, the agapé/caritas, the sisterhood of men. But this age... in the media it feels like there's no fixed grounds any more. Walking the path of compassion becomes so difficult.
I meant lessen the distance in how we now get far more news than we use too. We just hear so much that it becomes either at our door or not. When everything is happening close by, nothing is. Not...
I meant lessen the distance in how we now get far more news than we use too. We just hear so much that it becomes either at our door or not. When everything is happening close by, nothing is.
Not sure if I am explaining this right... Hopefully it makes some sense.
Ah, I see. That's close to my "topology" and "geometry" metaphors. The whole thing feels distorted. And maybe as I stare into this distorted thing, I feels twisted myself...
Ah, I see. That's close to my "topology" and "geometry" metaphors. The whole thing feels distorted. And maybe as I stare into this distorted thing, I feels twisted myself...
We have never been more aware of the appalling events that occur around the world every day. But in the face of so much horror, is there a danger that we become numb to the headlines – and does it matter if we do?
Maybe I'm missing the writer's thrust, but I feel like compassion fatigue among the general population has been a problem long before social media or the internet. Take homelessness for example. It was a problem long before the internet and has continued to be the same moral nightmare that it has been for a very long time. We haven't done the obvious thing and eminent domained unused land into low-income or even free housing. Even the laissez-faire solution of private charities and shelters has not solved this seemingly unchanging and interminable problem. We still accept that the speculative value of a vacant property outweighs the desire of someone to sleep under a roof. We believe that it's acceptable for a hotel room to go unused for a night rather than let someone stay in it for less than the market rate. We tell ourselves that the person huddled under a tarp or surrounded by shopping carts either wanted to live that way or deserved to live that way, as though that might absolve us of the sin of allowing another human being to live that way.
Is compassion fatigue inevitable? Compassion fatigue is already happening. It was never just unique to caregivers, or doctors, or nurses, or emergency workers. We have had compassion fatigue for the homeless for a long time and the results of that are predictable and all around us. I don't see our compassion fatigue towards victims of shootings, or victims of war, or victims of drug addiction, having any better outcome.
Does compassion fatigue matter? Yes it does. It should matter to all of us all the time. Complacency to human suffering should worry us no matter the context.
Wanted to start by saying I agree with your post and that it's well worded.
Personally, though compassion fatigue matters, I just don't see how anyone can be "on" all the time. This is something I've been dealing quite a bit with relatively recently as I tried to be more environmentally friendly, more specifically heading towards zero-waste. There's just so much, and I've only picked one of many causes.
Without basically "solving world hunger" level changes, the individually can only tackle a small part at a time.
I get this. I understand the logic and feeling that it is impossible to empathize 100% to everything without breaking down, but I think it's too easy to fall into a trap just turning our empathy off. Maybe I'm being too preachy, but I had an epiphany a few weeks ago that revealed to me what happens when I leave my empathy machine off for too long.
I was stopped at a cross walk and a person who is homeless made eye contact with me from across the street. Instead of returning the eye contact or even doing nothing, I moved so that the traffic light pole broke the line of sight between me and them just so that I wouldn't have to feel that suffering differential. I could have done anything else besides what I did, but I didn't want to feel bad. I was so complacent in my world that I essentially erased them from my reality rather than feel even a fraction of the suffering that I'm sure she had been dealing with in a much deeper and profound way. It wasn't until much later when I reflected on how much of a garbage human being I was to that person who didn't even ask me for anything but just made me uncomfortable in my bubble.
Maybe it was too much to propose that people keep their empathy machines on all the time -- it was definitely too much. But at the very least people should make sure that it can still run -- and if it doesn't I think one should really reflect on how they themselves in relation to all of the people around them.
I do absolutely get this. Not long after Trump was elected, I basically stopped following the news, any news. And really it wasn't until Tildes that I started listening to the news in the morning and reading it at breaks again.
I get this too, but I want to say - you're not. I think the fact that you stopped to think about him afterwards says something. Empathy is more than one moment.
I've held back on responding for a long time because I wasn't sure how best to do so, but I've decided that complacency to human suffering is the only reasonable option. Why care, when it's obvious that as long as we preserve the existing social, political, and economic order nothing will ever change?
We could make the world a better place right now. We have the resources. We have the technology. What we don't have are leaders willing to either lead or get the hell out of the way. Instead, the powers that be profit from the way things are, and actively impede efforts to improve the status quo.
This is why poverty persists. This is why the climate is changing. This is why none of us have a future.
This made me think of a quote from the movie Ever After that's something like "I use to think if I cared about anything, I would have to care about everything". I have always thought that was a bit how I felt about the issues that surround us. It's interesting to learn there's a really term for it.
Also this, before I really need to stop... taking care of ourselves is the precondition of taking care of (a small part of) the world.
I'm learning this lesson again and again.
I think the author described different kinds of compassion fatigue, each in a different context.
The fatigue of a caregiver (painfully experienced by herself) and the numbing or even apathy induced by media saturation, they're similar, but the contexts are different.
I remember a discussion about the latter in Erich Fromm's 1941 book The Fear of Freedom, so it's definitely not a recent concept. Fromm wrote that the mass media (radio, newspaper) eroded the media consumers' sense of tragedy. When disaster, war, and suffering were juxtaposed with the inane, the empty, the silly, the "clickbait", the advertisement, the propaganda -- and repeated ad nauseam in the daily churn of the industrial society -- the passive consumer became even more passive, and less likely to believe in other people's suffering. And apathy is an important ingredient in authoritarianism.
The consequence of depleted compassion is devastating. It's not merely the difficulty to muster the efforts to give care, the erosion of motivation. It strikes at our belief in our own capacity to be compassionate and to act in a helpful way. It breeds learned helplessness, which in turn beckons other ills. It attacks our core self.
I've got interested in one detail in the article.
This referred to a therapist's solution to compassion fatigue. The author's own experience with this wasn't positive, as she was already burned out caring for her ill husband. "Everyone has their own local tragedy," she wrote.
I feel that when the author wrote it, she meant it, and it was understandable. But I think the therapist's might have some different context in mind.
I refer to the observation of Stanley Milgram:
I think the therapist's context might have been closer to this, also from that article:
Distance appears here a double-edged sword.
It's entirely natural and human that we extend compassion more readily when the other is nearer. By being mindful in the nearby scenarios, we develop a resilient morality. When the other is far away, abstract, symbolic, mediated by the mass media that devours the message, we're more prone to apathy and its consequences. It seems in the latter scenario, what gets us is the feeling of inability. A compassionate emotion arises in us, but is frustrated by the distance. At this moment of vulnerability, the media immediately fills the void by distraction, because it's flood of information is infinite, and its constant surveillance knows what does the job the best. In this loop the media makes money, thereby making itself more effective in enforcing the loop.
However, a persistent dedication to a near cause is hard, too. The suffering of the nearby one, repeated without end in sight, depletes us unlike by the impenetrable, obstinate media. It's the time, the wear, the absence of end in sight. Instead of leaving one pent up, it sucks one dry.
The author wrote
How true the ambiguous feeling! Perhaps we can never be sure of our exact boundary. I felt that as the author articulated her difficulty, to confront it as a writer, she was also trying to get more grip on this feeling of certainty that she felt was slipping away.
It was really difficult for her to do this, to analyse the depletion while depleted. This alone, as I see it, is a testament to her character and something I can't express clearly, something like "liveliness".
A laudable woman. I have only respect toward her.
This was really interesting. Thanks for this perspective.
Though the concept of compassion fatigue has been around for a while, I do feel our sense of time and distance, which affects our ability to care, has changed with modern technology. Time comes to us in shorter bursts, while distance becomes at times negligible. We have a lot more to care about in a shorter time frame, which maybe causes the fatigue faster?
Maybe that's the case. I don't know.
And I don't know if distance got diminished by the modern ways of communicating. Psychological distance, I'm afraid not, especially in the current for-profit mainstream social media and its ecosystem. This beast... I feel in it there's the potential of distorting everything. A thick, dense fog, with nightmarish topology and geometry.
Maybe the origin of compassion has something very territorial about it, something connected to land, tribe, neighbour. It may sound in-group selfish this way, but with reason and spiritual yearning, a natural tendency to pour out, it grows out to become the greater compassion, the ren of Mencius, the agapé/caritas, the sisterhood of men. But this age... in the media it feels like there's no fixed grounds any more. Walking the path of compassion becomes so difficult.
I meant lessen the distance in how we now get far more news than we use too. We just hear so much that it becomes either at our door or not. When everything is happening close by, nothing is.
Not sure if I am explaining this right... Hopefully it makes some sense.
Ah, I see. That's close to my "topology" and "geometry" metaphors. The whole thing feels distorted. And maybe as I stare into this distorted thing, I feels twisted myself...