How to fight 'compassion fatigue'
My phone flashes to life with a news notification. Another political scandal has broken out. It’s not the first such notification of the day, and it won’t be the last. I should turn them off, really. But I don’t. I can’t quite abandon that feeling of wanting to know what’s happening. I feel like I’ve been conditioned to feel that way over time, and I get annoyed at that thought. But still the notifications stay on.
Inflammatory social media feeds churning over, 24 hour news channels screaming at us, newspaper headlines fanning the flames of rhetoric, a proliferation of podcasts deep-diving into all manners of woe in the world. It’s hard to power down the world around us, as it seemingly desires to drive us into feelings of despair at the state of it all.
Income inequality, corrupt politicians, racial or gender-based injustice, the destruction of the climate. All around us are reasons to feel disheartened. To feel angry, perhaps. After all, the 21st century media business model since the advent of social media has evolved to be built on ‘enrage and engage’. When we see something that we feel disagrees with our world’s view, we feel provoked and are more likely to react, and the algorithms behind these platforms know this, and feed off it.
We’ve been living with these feelings for a while, and they’re having an effect on us all. This constant exposure has led to what was classified as ‘compassion fatigue’ in an article by The Guardian 5 years ago. The writer defines it as:
“A state of exhaustion and dysfunction, biologically, physiologically and emotionally, as a result of prolonged exposure to compassion stress”.
And its impact is often far more insidiuous than simply driving enragement. Over prolonged periods, it can lead to something worse - apathy. The fire in us extinguishes, the light within becomes consumed.
So how can we escape this cycle? How can we embark on the challenge of witnessing the injustice of the world, and not allowing it to consume our light?
In a previous article, I wrote about the importance of recognising what we are, and what we aren’t responsible for in life. And fundamentally this is about establishing boundaries in our life.
When we establish boundaries, we are making an active choice. Without them, we are letting others make decisions for us about our lives. And in those moments, we give up our agency. We lose sight of our ability to make choices for ourself.
We’ve all experienced the difficulty in falling out with a friend, colleague, or partner. Perhaps you’ve had a disagreement over a debate, or it’s more egregious - one of you has clearly violated trust in the relationship. Emotions come to the fore, and they are all too easy to react to. You may think that you’ve handled your emotions well, you’ve expressed how you feel about the matter and are willing to move on, but the other side just won’t let it go. They keep coming back and poking at the wound, trying to provoke a response in an attempt to address their own needs over the issue.
In these situations, we have a choice. We can either acquiesce to their demands, and allow them to draw us further into a situation that we cannot control, nor want to be in. Or we can create a boundary about what we are, and aren’t willing to respond to.
In scenarios like these, we cannot control, nor are we responsible for, how others might be feeling. We might be responsible for our actions that led them to feel that way, but are not responsible for how they feel. Other people’s feelings in a given situation arise out of a compendium of life experiences, not just one isolated incident. Perhaps part of their feelings is linked to an ill-parent at home, or it reminds them of a past friend’s betrayal.
The point is that we can only ever be responsible for the things that we can control. Or, to put it another way, the Stoic philosophers believed:
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.”
Focusing on what you can, and cannot control, is the first step in setting effective boundaries. This is hard, because it always requires us to let go. To let go of the idea that we can influence and change other people, events, or circumstances, when the reality is that in most cases in life, this simply isn’t true. All we can truly control, is ourselves, and the choices that we make.
This act lies at the heart of Stoicism, a school of thought that teaches that our well-being and happiness are determined by our own thoughts, attitudes, and actions rather than external circumstances, as these are primarily beyond our control. By directing our attention and efforts toward the things within our control, the Stoics believed we could achieve inner tranquility, and live a virtuous life.
By focusing on what we can control—our thoughts and actions—we can detach ourselves from the outcomes and externalities of things like the news cycle, or repugnant social media exchanges, or obviously click-baity headlines, leading to greater freedom and self-sufficiency.
Epictetus would go on to say:
“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.”
When we perceive injustice in the world, we have a choice. When Putin invaded Ukraine and put the lives of millions of innocent people at risk, we have a choice. Can we do something to stop the deeply insecure psychpath directly? Uness you are willing to take up arms and join the front lines, the answer is most likely ‘no’. But can we decide how we want to contribute to fighting this injustice by donating a sum of money to a Ukrainian refugee charity? Yes. This is something we can control, and focusing on that is all that is expected of us.
When we see racial injustice in the wake of a disgusting attack on a minority group for the sole crime of having more melanin, is any one of our actions able to solve this problem in its entirety? No, that is beyond our control. But can we call out a friend who makes a derogatory comment at a bar that is plainly hurtful? Yes.
It is in these small actions that we know we can control that we can keep the light within us burning. These actions should be guided by the values that we’ve decided matter to us and our lives. Because ultimately if everyone kept their light alive in this way, the seemingly insurmountable problems themselves would start to fade.
But if we allow ourselves to extinguish too soon through caring too much about things we cannot control, by becoming compassionately fatigued over things we are not responsible for, we create a breeding ground for injustice.
Keeping our light alive in fighting daily injustices in any ways that we can, no matter how small they might seem, requires us to be selective over what we choose to fight for. And always thinking about what we can, and cannot, control - and directing our actions, thoughts and choices in that direction.