I’ve been struggling lately in the way I imagine many of you have been struggling, which is to say I have been waking each morning into the unbearable mathematics of human suffering. Too many bodies beneath too much rubble. Too many people pushing their lives in shopping carts through cities that no longer know how to look them in the eye. Too many prayers sitting unanswered in hospital rooms and shelters and eviction courts and subway stations at three in the morning. Some days it feels like the whole world is asking the human spirit to bench press grief until its arms give out.

A group of my colleagues and I organized our first of many effort to support children living in the neighborhood I grew up, and before anything else I want to thank everyone who donated, shared the fundraiser, or simply allowed themselves to care in a time that increasingly punishes people for feeling too much. Together, we raised over $1,216. As I sit and consider this I found myself sitting with an unexpected sadness I will try to explain.

Not because people failed to show up. People did show up. Generously. Tenderly. But because we did actually reach our goal of $1,216, and because after the money is accounted for it will make the work much easier for the folks that devote their livelihood to making kids in a neighborhood I grew up have stability early in their lives. That's it. That's all we are aiming for, make space for people, provide folks tools to make life feel safe.

I think what saddened me was not simply that the ask was small. I have known the need is actually much larger for YEARS. I’ve understood this sort of need since I was a boy watching my mother boil water on the stove so I could have a warm bath. I think what saddened me was realizing how quickly suffering absorbs generosity in this country.

You gather a little over thousand dollars and within days it is gone because the wound itself is so enormous. (What's interesting is that this will go significantly further in Kenya).

And lately the wound seems to be everywhere.

You open your phone and watch children carried from collapsed buildings overseas while commentators debate whether their deaths are politically inconvenient. You walk through many cities and pass men sleeping beneath scaffolding while luxury towers rise above them like monuments erected to the worship of indifference. You see a woman carrying everything she owns in garbage bags, stopping every few minutes to readjust the weight of them on her shoulder as though personhood itself has become something physically heavy to carry in this country. You stand in line at a pharmacy and overhear someone quietly asking which prescription they can afford to leave behind.

And after a while, if you are not careful, the sheer volume of suffering begins to alter your relationship to feeling itself.

I think many people are living with this now. Not hopelessness exactly. Something perhaps more dangerous. A slow emotional starvation. We are witnessing so much catastrophe at once that people are beginning to lose faith in the usefulness of tenderness. Climate collapse. Fascism. Loneliness. War. Poverty. Economic terror. Spiritual exhaustion. Human suffering arrives now in such relentless quantities that many people have unconsciously started training themselves not to feel too deeply because to feel everything would shatter them.

There are days lately when I can feel this happening inside myself.

There are days when I feel something in me trying to retreat from the world emotionally because remaining open to this much pain begins to feel unbearable after a while. I think that is the part people rarely confess publicly.

Caring hurts. Paying attention hurts.

Which is why I understand exactly why people choose numbness. Numbness can feel like survival. But I also think numbness is what these systems are counting on.

Cruel societies do not survive merely because of wealth or violence. They survive because ordinary people eventually begin believing another person’s suffering is not their concern. They survive because exhaustion convinces people that empathy is naïve. They survive because human beings become so overwhelmed by the scale of pain surrounding them that they stop believing small acts of care matter at all.

And yet if you look honestly at how most people survive difficult periods in their lives, it is almost never institutions that save them first.

It is another person.

Someone pays for groceries, someone sends money for medication, someone offers a couch, someone calls at the right moment, someone sends a few dollars at the very moment someone else was praying someone would help.

I think often now about what this era is doing to the human spirit. We are living in a culture that rewards detachment because detachment is profitable. Everything encourages us not to look too closely. Not to feel too deeply. Not to become too burdened by the suffering of strangers. Human beings are increasingly taught to experience tragedy as spectators instead of participants in one another’s lives. And once suffering becomes ordinary enough, once abandonment begins feeling natural enough, almost any cruelty becomes possible.

That frightens me more than the cruelty itself sometimes.

I think it is a crisis of feeling. A crisis of imagination. A crisis of responsibility. We are losing the ability to believe we belong to one another.


I don’t believe mutual aid alone can save the world. It cannot. But I do believe there is something sacred in refusing to surrender entirely to indifference. I believe there is something radical in deciding another person’s suffering is your concern even when the world insists it should not be. I believe there is something profoundly human in trying to lessen the burden another person carries through this life, even slightly.

And maybe that reminder is more to me than any of you reading this.

Because when it’s all said and done, I think the question is ultimately what kind of people we will allow suffering to turn us into.

Anyway, thank you all for continuing to show up in the ways that you do. For sharing.