Terrible things are happening all time. Right now, as you read it, people are suffering in monstrous, awful ways. Many, many people.
That’s how it is. That’s how it has always been, and as long as there is life of the type there is on Earth, that’s the way it will be. Human and many animal bodies are built for pain and suffering, and not only are we often astoundingly cruel to each other, but accident, disease and the infirmities of old age will scourge us till we, perhaps, become homo-deus.
One of the wisest things I ever read was a 90+ year old who met their spouse to be at the gym, when they were both in their 90s, who said, “neither my (spouse) nor I spend one second worrying about anything we can’t control.”
And, if you can control something, there’s no reason to worry about that.
Bad things are happening all the time. But if you get upset about them, you aren’t helping: your being upset doesn’t make the situation better.
What it does do is make you suffer. All you’re doing is making the world worse, for yourself.
This is one of the most important things I’ve ever written, so re-read the above two paragraphs and think about them.
Much of our sympathetic suffering is because we think that we should be upset, or angry, or worried. Having the emotion either feels like something a good person would do (and we want to be good people) or it feels like, in itself, it is taking action.
Or both. Read that last paragraph again.
There are absolutely situations where feeling bad is wise: they are almost all where you are with someone else who is feeling bad, and your sympathetic misery lets them know you care.
But even in such situations, staying miserable is rarely helpful to the other person. Getting in sync with them, then helping lift them out sometimes works and sometimes what they need is just your misery with them.
But when you leave their presence, being miserable doesn’t help them, and it hurts you.
You also don’t need to feel bad to take action. You can do something to help people who are suffering without having to suffer yourself.
The best states to help from are usually compassion or love. Those states are good for you and good for the people you’re helping.
But first don’t make the world worse by suffering when your suffering doesn’t help.
This is a real disease in our society and it is made worse by 24/7 global coverage of bad shit. There’s always something terrible happening and you can always find something to feel terrible about. Our sympathetic mirroring of others emotions arose when we lived in small bands, it is not adapted to an internet world where we identify with people we’ve never met and never will.
But to break this habit, to stop hurting yourself, you have to internalize the logic that not feeling bad when bad things happen, especially bad things when you’re not there, does not mean you’re a bad person and you need to split the idea of “feeling” from taking action to help. (And, after all, most of the time you aren’t going to do anything, and often you effectively can’t do anything: there’s just too much evil.)
To do this, to break these connection is the ethical and moral action, because hurting yourself is not required in most cases to help others, so all you’re doing is increasing the world’s suffering. As the Buddha supposedly said, “your compassion is not complete if it does not include yourself.”
Please stop hurting yourself needlessly.