How do people do it? Grief hurts so much when one person dies; wouldn’t large-scale death and suffering just magnify it?
I always wonder about this during natural disasters (Nepal) or human-made disasters (Yemen, with worse prospects looming.)
Some old timey dude once said:
I’m not sure how true it is, but it seems apt. The death toll for the Nepal earthquake is barely comprehensible to me.
The suffering in Nepal, though tragic, bothers me much less than my brother’s death last month. And I didn’t even like my brother. Someone who grieved over the death of every stranger would be unable to function.
Life is full of Death.
Just imagine how people lived in the past, and currently live in less friendly environments. Every day is filled with death. You can get injured and die. You can get sick and die. You can eat the wrong thing and die. You can die for reasons no one around you can explain.
Death isn’t some distant thing, except to our coddled, luxury filled modern minds.
is it affecting you directly? can you do anything to change it?
to get upset about endless suffering is endless suffering.
do what you can to be good for yourself. do what you can to be good for others; though at times it might be just a small bit and may be more or less depending on the day.
That’s what I’m talking about. I’m wondering about how people stay sane when they are part of such a situation.
If most people went insane, then they would not have as much reproductive success, and disasters and battles were something people have had to deal with for many millennia.
On the other hand, extremely loud, long battles that leave you sleep-deprived against an unseen enemy are not something we have had to deal with for all of our history, so that may explain why humans are likely to develop PTSD from such things.
I was a gay man in NYC during the first decades of the AIDS crisis. One by one I lost virtually every other gay man I knew . . . almost all my friends and lovers and acquaintances. There were times when I had two or three funerals/memorial services to go to at the same time. These were irreplaceable lives, men who were struck down at - or before - the prime of their lives, some of the most beautiful souls I’ve every had the privilege of knowing. Almost my entire generation was wiped out.
Volunteering and activism help me get through those years. in between emptying my friends’ bedpans and treating their lesions, I knew I was playing a part in cutting through the red tape and government bureaucracy, to get them the help they needed.
It doesn’t help to remind myself that I’m a survivor, as a part of me died with every loss. But I have a very strong partner, and I really don’t know where I’d be now, without him . . . or how I survived before we met in 1987. When I think back at all the losses, it helps to have someone to lean on and embrace.
A wise man named Rico- when asked the question “what is the meaning of life?”- responded simply:
“It ends.”
Well, it was Stalin who supposedly said it, so there’s that.
People tend to be indifferent about the deaths of people they don’t know. Even if it’s thousands of folks.
And they get callous; I don’t think seeing dead bodies of strangers causes them grief. Family or loved friends though? Still devastating.
The human mind has defenses against shocking circumstances. Dissociation. Compartmentalization. Sublimation.
Dissociation and compartmentalization are both ways of insulating the mind from the shock. The former is sort of like “walking away” from the horror for a while; losing track of time or context. The latter is more like putting the shock in a box; there’s a monster in the closet, but the door is shut, and you’re ignoring it as hard as you can. Part of your mind may be screaming or crying, but the part that’s in charge is thinking about clearing debris.
Sublimation involves redirecting emotions into something easier to cope with. Horror to anger–justified or not–or to gallows humor. Consider the “jokes” mentioned in the link below by an inmate who worked on Hart Island. [Link spoilered for non-graphic, but probably disturbing images.]
There are others. What they all do, though, is buy time. Time for the immediate aftermath to be dealt with. Time for memory to fade a bit. Time to process the shock. Time to get on with surviving. It may not be psychologically healthy in the long term, but it’s healthier than lying down and joining the dead.