Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
Lately, in order to help with my mental health, I’ve been avoiding news about the current political situation, and it’s been really helping. I haven’t totally buried my head in the sand; I still get some info from others and the stuff that leaks into my social media (which I’ve also been using less) and stuff like John Oliver, but overall, I haven’t been giving it all much thought, and focusing on my hobbies and the people around me have seriously helped.
But obviously I do feel a bit guilty about it. I see people constantly talking about how everyone needs to help as much as they can, about how apathy and resulting inaction is exactly what people in power want. I guess my dilemma is that question: By choosing to take a break, am I giving them exactly what they want? Part of me knows that I probably can’t help very effectively if my mental health is terrible, but another part of me knows that the world won’t pause with me.
I think your question is fundamentally about attention. We usually think of attention as a cognitive resource, but it’s an ethical resource, too. In fact, you could say it’s the prerequisite for all ethical action.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil wrote. She argued that it’s only by deeply paying attention to others that we can develop the capacity to understand what it’s really like to be them. That allows us to feel compassion, and compassion drives us to action.
Truly paying attention is incredibly hard, Weil says, because it requires you to see a suffering person not just as “a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.” In other words, you don’t get “the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself” — you have to recognize that you’re a vulnerable creature, too, and tragedy could befall you just as easily as it’s befallen the suffering person in front of you.
So, when you “pay attention,” you really are paying something. You pay with your own sense of invulnerability. Engaging this way costs you dearly — that’s why it’s the “purest form of generosity.”
Doing this is hard enough even in the best of circumstances. But nowadays, we live in an era when our capacity for attention is under attack.
Modern technology has given us a glut of information, constantly streaming in from all over the world. There’s too much to pay attention to, so we live in an exhausted state of information overload. That’s even truer at a time when politicians intentionally “flood the zone” with a ceaseless flow of new initiatives.
Plus, as I’ve written before, digital tech is designed to fragment our focus, which degrades our capacity for moral attention — the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately. Just think of all the times you’ve seen an article in your Facebook feed about anguished people desperate for help — starving children in Yemen, say — only to get distracted by a funny meme that appears right above it.
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The problem isn’t just that our attention is limited and fragmented — it’s also that we don’t know how to manage the attention we do have. As the tech ethicist James Williams writes“the main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information…but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes.”
Consider a game of Tetris, he says. The abundance of blocks raining down on your screen is not the problem — given enough time, you could figure out how to stack them. The problem is that they fall at an increasing speed. And at extreme speeds, your brain just can’t process very well. You start to panic. You lose control.
It’s the same with a constant firehose of news. Being subjected to that torrent can leave you confused, disoriented, and ultimately just desperate to get away from the flood.
So, more information isn’t always better. Instead of trying to take in as much info as possible, we should try to take in info in a way that serves the real goal: enhancing, or at least preserving, our capacity for moral attention.
That’s why some thinkers nowadays talk about the importance of reclaiming “attentional sovereignty.” You need to be able to direct your attentional resources deliberately. If you strategically withdraw from an overwhelming information environment, that’s not necessarily a failure of civic duty. It can be an exercise of your agency that ultimately helps you engage with the news more meaningfully.
But you’ve got to be intentional about how you do this. I’m all for limiting your news intake, but I’d encourage you to come up with a strategy and stick to it. Instead of a slightly haphazard approach — you mention “the stuff that leaks into my social media” — consider identifying one or two major news sites that you’ll check for ten minutes each day while having your morning coffee. You can also subscribe to a newsletter, like Vox’s The Logoff, that’s specifically designed to update you on the most important news of the day so you can tune out all the extra noise.
It’s also important to consider not only how you’re going to withdraw attention from the news, but also what you’ll invest it in instead. You mention spending more time on hobbies and the people around you, which is great. But be careful not to cocoon yourself exclusively in the realm of the personal — a privilege many people don’t have. Though you shouldn’t engage with the political realm 24/7, you’re not totally exempt from it either.
One valuable thing you can do is devote some time to training your moral attention. There are lots of ways to do that, from reading literature (as philosopher Martha Nussbaum recommends) to meditating (as the Buddhists recommend).
I’ve personally benefited from both those techniques, but one thing I like about meditation is that you can do it in real time even while you’re reading the news. In other words, it doesn’t have to be only a thing you do instead of news consumption — it can be a practice that changes how you pay attention to the news.
Even as a journalist, I find it hard to read the news because it’s painful to see stories of people suffering — I end up feeling what’s usually called “compassion fatigue.” But I’ve learned that’s actually a misnomer. It should really be called “empathy fatigue.”
Compassion and empathy are not the same thing, even though we often conflate the concepts. Empathy is when you share the feelings of other people. If other people are feeling pain, you feel paintoo — literally.
Not so with compassion, which is more about feeling warmth toward a suffering person and being motivated to help them.
Practicing compassion both makes us happier and helps us make other people happier.
In a study published in 2013 at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, researchers put volunteers in a brain scanner, showed them gruesome videos of people suffering, and asked them to empathize with the sufferers. The fMRI showed activated neural circuits centered around the insula in our cerebral cortex — exactly the circuits that get activated when we’re in pain ourselves.
Compare that with what happened when the researchers took a different group of volunteers and gave them eight hours of training in compassion, then showed them the graphic videos. A totally different set of brain circuits lit up: those for love and warmth, the sort a parent feels for a child.
When we feel empathy, we feel like we’re suffering, and that’s upsetting. Though empathy is useful for getting us to notice other people’s pain, it can ultimately cause us to tune out to help alleviate our own feelings of distress, and can even cause serious burnout.
Amazingly, compassion — because it fosters positive feelings — actually attenuates the empathetic distress that can cause burnout, as neuroscientist Tania Singer has demonstrated in her lab. In other words, practicing compassion both makes us happier and helps us make other people happier.
In fact, one fMRI study showed that in very experienced practitioners — think Tibetan yogis — compassion meditation that involves wishing for people to be free from suffering actually triggers activity in the brain’s motor centers, preparing the practitioners’ bodies to physically move in order to help whoever is suffering, even as they’re still lying in the brain scanner.
So, how can you practice compassion while reading the news?
A simple Tibetan Buddhist technique called Tonglen meditation trains you to be present with suffering instead of turning away from it. It’s a multistep process when done as a formal sitting meditation, but if you’re doing it after reading a news story, you can take just a few seconds to do the core practice.
First, you let yourself come into contact with the pain of someone you see in the news. As you breathe in, imagine that you’re breathing in their pain. And as you breathe out, imagine that you’re sending them relief, warmth, compassion.
That’s it. It doesn’t sound like much — and, on its own, it won’t help the suffering people you read about. But it’s a dress rehearsal for the mind. By doing this mental exercise, we’re training ourselves to stay present with someone’s suffering instead of resorting to “the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself,” as Weil put it. And we’re training our capacity for moral attention, so that we can then help others in real life.
I hope you consume the news in moderation, and that when you do consume it, you try to do so while practicing compassion. With any luck, you’ll leave feeling like those Tibetan yogis in the brain scanner: energized to help others out in the world.
Bonus: What I’m reading
There’s a poem that recently gave me some relief from my own news-induced anxiety. It’s this poem by Wendell Berryand it’s about how to “come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”I enjoyed this piece in Psyche on “Why it’s possible to be optimistic in a world of bad news.” It explains Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s view that while ours is not a perfect world — it’s so full of suffering — it still might be the optimal world.This week’s question about news consumption prompted me to revisit the work of the 20th-century French philosophers Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillardby listening to episodes about them on the Philosophy Bites podcast. They argued that the media feeds us simulations of reality, and actually makes us more disconnected from the world because we forget that we’re getting an imitation and not the real thing. Have a listen!
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