That’s what I’m getting at: I don’t think it’s just a you problem. The cliched-ness of the examples (hungry child, climate change, powerful men making life-or-death decisions), the very fact that they are common enough to be cliches, makes me think of the callouses that build up out of necessity that allow us to function in a world filled with things that, should we ever experience them first-hand, would shatter us. Or would they? I’ve never seen a child starve to death. I don’t know how I would react. But the fact that such awful things happen while I blithely comparison shop soaps is… it feels like it should be jarring but it isn’t, and that absence is a kind of discomfort I don’t have a good word for. Ennui maybe?
That’s what I’m getting at: I don’t think it’s just a you problem. The cliched-ness of the examples (hungry child, climate change, powerful men making life-or-death decisions), the very fact that they are common enough to be cliches, makes me think of the callouses that build up out of necessity that allow us to function in a world filled with things that, should we ever experience them first-hand, would shatter us. Or would they? I’ve never seen a child starve to death. I don’t know how I would react. But the fact that such awful things happen while I blithely comparison shop soaps is… it feels like it should be jarring but it isn’t, and that absence is a kind of discomfort I don’t have a good word for. Ennui maybe?