The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

It is one of the terrible parts of disaster, our complicity: the way we glamorize it and make it consumable; the way the news turns disasters into ready-made cinema; the way war movies, which mean to critique war, can really only glorify war.

Social media, with its reach and immediacy, even intimacy, threatens the “us versus them” classifications we make so naturally. It exposes us to people who are suffering thousands of miles away.

Whether or not I personally keep up with everything happening everywhere all the time, I know it exists; that awareness alone is fatiguing. It’s very easy to succumb to fatalism, perhaps the logical extension of compassion fatigue—believing we’re “fucked” no matter what we do is mysteriously tempting.

In this light, compassion is a matter of aesthetics.

To skeptics, psychogenic pain is somehow less real than other pain. But all pain is in the mind.

Trying to scale up technologies that work on the local level leads to depletion of resources and other unforeseen consequences that can ultimately collapse the system.

Not until we experience new forms of disaster can we understand what it is we need to prevent.

Coffee and antidepressants are good drugs, or moral drugs, because they don’t prevent us from doing our jobs. But opiates and alcohol are morally questionable—they change reality too much.

There’s no compassion fatigue without compassion: The caretakers at risk see somebody suffering, and they want to reduce the suffering. But they can’t always succeed. Compassion fatigue, then, is stymied compassion.