I’ve always felt that I do have an obligation to know about the suffering of others. Take for example the Russia/Ukraine war. If people are being shot, raped, stabbed, starved, tortured and murdered, the least I can do is know about their suffering.
I’ve very recently stopped watching the news, following politics, watching/listening to true crime and I’ve noticed a significant improvement to my mood. But I feel a bit guilty for not following along with things going on the world and knowing what others are going through.
I think it’s good to take a break now-and-then. If you acknowledge suffering exists, it really doesn’t matter where it comes from, I think that that’s all that matters. There’s a lot of suffering to go around. I personally wouldn’t turn off any news for too long, but taking breaks is almost essential for me.
My life is way better since I turned off the news, and the world is no worse off. My partner hasn’t come to the same conclusion (yet), so I sometimes have to leave the house when she turns on the radio.
Instead I’ve decided I can have an actual impact of some degree by carefully examining and adjusting the things in my own life that I have some control over - like energy use, purchase decisions, consumption, travel, use of problematic substances, etc.
This is a tough question. One point I’ll make is that “knowing about the suffering of others” isn’t a binary, you-do-or-you-don’t kind of thing. There are many, many people all over the world who are suffering from many diffferent things in many different ways. It is practically impossible, and probably would be psychologically unhealthy, for you to know about all of them.
At the other extreme, for you to be completely unaware and unconcerned about anyone else’s suffering isn’t good either.
We should never be blinded to the suffering in the world, but what we should not do is torment ourselves with it.
We should do what we can to make things better, but we must know we can’t address everything and each may not be able to completely fix what we can address.
Often what happens is that headlines will make you feel like you should be doing something, anything, about THIS, above all else, NOW… and two days later it will be something else. That is naturally exhausting. Not to mention it leaves the effort to attend to the earlier problem in the lurch as attention shifts.
I think there is a difference between knowing about suffering and ruminating on every single detail to the point that it destroys your mental health. Historically, people only knew about what was happening in their immediate vicinity - that is how we evolved - and I’m not sure we’re great at handling the psychological burden of knowing what’s happening all over the globe. If you get too much input you sink into despair, and then you are useless to do anything about the suffering.
I work in a field where I am confronted with a lot of difficult things - Rape and domestic violence statistics, survivor stories that haunt me, the ongoing reality that there’s still so much work to do after decades of effort. During the #metoo movement when this stuff was all over the media it was extra-special-hard, and it didn’t help that I had taken on the advocacy role online as well as my job. It nearly broke me. My lowest point was losing an entire night’s sleep arguing with someone on this board, and I was so messed up by morning I couldn’t go into work. I thought I was going to have to quit. I finally talked to my favorite advocate about it, asking him how to cope with it all, and he said, you know, other people are working on this issue too. You don’t have to carry it 24/7. That’s why we have a community.
It changed my outlook, and the way I lived my life. I no longer go out of my way to read these stories and fight these fights. I do the best job I can and I let the rest go.
I also stopped watching the news, and I only vaguely follow politics any more. I am much happier. I think ruminating on the world’s injustice is separate from whether we’re actually doing something about these issues, through our votes or our letters or our donated dollars. As best as I can tell, the relentless focus on one calamity after the next is ruining our mental health. When we focus less on these things, it can give us the mental clarity to actually do something about them. At least, that’s been the case for me.
There’s also the question of, what do you intend to do with the knowledge? It’s one thing to know about Gaza or the evils of capitalism or climate change or whatever, but much of the debate over this question that I see assumes that, on some level, knowing leads to doing something more than shedding tears. Not necessarily marching on the streets, but political activism, volunteering for aid organizations, something worthwhile.
It’s tricky, because the two issues are inextricably linked, but not quite the same, IMO.
I think they’re not even close. I think most people get the halo effect from feeling really bad and angry about social problems, and their brain is tricked into thinking getting sad and angry is doing anything useful, so they are less likely to do anything meaningful to promote change. AFAIK that has not been studied though.
We review the aspects of the response styles theory that have been well-supported, including evidence that rumination exacerbates depression, enhances negative thinking, impairs problem solving, interferes with instrumental behavior, and erodes social support.
I am deeply interested in this subject. I will probably read the whole paper. I stopped ruminating in November and it has completely transformed my life.
(Note: Rumination in the clinical sense is usually defined as thinking about being depressed or anxious. I will keep digging and see if I can find anything on social issues.)
How do you pick and choose which unpleasantness to care about/act on? Is the shit going on in (name your foreign country) more worth your attention and emotions than the shit going on in your own country/town? Is human suffering worse than climate/ecological damage? Political bullshit? And, as mentioned, what do you do with your awareness/knowledge?
For me, I find it pretty sufficient to believe that there is a whole lot of ugliness going on in the world, and little chance of really improving things on either a global or worldwide basis. So I have VERY limited interest in learning specifics/depth about any specific instances/localities. I flip thru the front section of the daily paper VERY quickly, just thinking, “More ugly shit going on in the same/new locations.” I sorta feel I am more emotionally at ease the more ignorant I am about such ugliness.
Me feeling lousy about such situations is unlikely to change them. I’ve decided the best I can do is try to live the best life I am personally capable of, focussing my efforts extremely locally on the people I encounter and the places I am, hoping I effect minuscule individual changes and set a decent example for others to act similarly.
I can see the value in that on a personal level, but as a systems change strategy, it’s extremely inefficient. Of course systems can change for the better. They do all the time.
It’s the reason I went into macro social work. My Dean of social work school was a conservative man, but I agreed with him in many respects. He was a troll for the common good, and one of the things he did to the consternation of others was absolutely eviscerate that stupid starfish analogy. He said, “Hey, maybe figure out why all those starfish are washing up on the beach in the first place.” It was lost on a lot of direct practice workers, but for me, that is exactly my personal and professional orientation to life. The smallest change at the exact right place can have a huge impact, and it’s super fun trying to figure out where that point of intervention is. (We need direct practice workers, obviously, to make that change happen. Both people like me and people like them are required to make it work.) I have since noticed that macro social work has exploded as a field of interest. It used to be there was only one state licensing exam heavily geared toward clinical social workers, now in the state of Michigan there is a separate exam for macro social workers. I’ve considered taking it but it’s still difficult to find macro supervision, and it is not at all required for my job.