Your mileage can vary It is a column of advice that sacrifices you a unique frame to think about your moral dilemmas. To send a question, complete this Anonymous form Or send an email to sigal.samuel@vox.com. Here is the question of this week of a reader, condensate and edited by clarity:
Lately, to help with my mental health, I have avoided the news about the current political situation, and his leg really helps. I have not completely buried my head in the sand; I still get information from others and the things that are filtered in my social networks (which have also been using less) and things like John Oliver, but in general, I have not thought much and I have focused on my hobbies and the people around me.
But obviously I feel a little guilty about that. I see that people constantly talk about how to help as much as they can, how the apathy and inaction of results is exactly what people in power want. I guess my dilemma is that question: when I choose to take a break, am I giving you exactly what they want? A part of me knows that it is likely that I cannot help very effective if my mental health is terrible, but another part of me knows that the world won a pause with me.
I think your question is essential about attention. We usually think about attention as a cognitive resource, but it is also an ethical resource. In fact, it could be said that it is the prerequisite for all ethical action.
“Attention is the rarest and most pure way of generosity,” the French philosopher of the twentieth century Simone Weil wrote. She argued that she only deeply pays attention to others that we can develop the ability to understand what they really are. That allows us to feel compassion, and compassion leads us to action.
Weil says that paying attention is truly incredible, because it requires that you see a suffering person not only as “a specimen of the social category labeled as” unfortunate “, but as a man, exactly like the rich one, that. what is it.
So, when you “pay attention,” you are really lending something. You pay with your own sense of filling. Involving this way of being expensive, so it is the “purest form of generosity.”
Doing this is quite difficult in the best circumstances. But today, we live in an era in which our attention capacity is under attack.
Modern technology has given us an excess of information, constantly transmitting from around the world. There is too much To pay attention, so we live in an exhausted state of information overload. That is equally Jersey at a time when politicians intentionally “Flood the area“With an incessant flow of new initiatives.
In addition, as I am written before, Digital Tech is designed to fragment our approach, which relegates our Moral attention capacity – The ability to notice the morally outstanding characteristics of a specific situation so that we can respond in a learned way. Just think about all the times you have seen an article in your Facebook diet to people desperate for help, looking at children in Yemen, for example, just to get distracted with a fun meme that appears correctly suboverizes.
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The problem is not just that our attention is limited and fragmented, we also do not know how to handle the attention we have. Like technological ethics James Williams writes“The main plant of abundance of risk information is not that one is busy ORPÍN Used to for information … but one Lose control over The attentional processes of one. ”
Consider a play of Tetris, he says. The abundance of blocks that rained on your screen is not the problem: given enough time, you can discover how to stack them. The problem is that they fall at an increasing speed. And at extreme speeds, your brain cannot be processed very well. You begin to panic. You lose control.
It is the same with a constant news sleeve. Being up to that torrent can leave it confused, disoriented and, ultimately, desperate to get away from the flood.
So, more information is not always better. Instead of trying to enjoy as much information as possible, we must try to take information in a way that serves the real objective: improve, or at least preserve, our capacity for moral attention.
That is why some thinkers today talk about the importance of recovering “Sovereign Attentional. “You must direct your attention resources deliberately.
But you must be intentional about how to do this. I am in favor of limiting your news intake, but I encourage you to come with a strategy and stick to it. Instead of a slightly casual approach, you mention “the things that are filtered on my social networks”, consider identifying one or two main news sites that will verify for minutes every day drinking your coffee in the morning. You can also subscribe to a newsletter, such as Vox is the achievementThat is specifically designed to update it on the most important news of the day so you can disconnect all additional noise.
It is also important to consider not only how the news is going to withdraw, but also what it will invest. You mention spending more time in hobbies and people around you, which is great. But be careful not to cover exclusive in the field of personal, a privilege that many people do not have. I thought you should not get involved with the political kingdom 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you are not totally exempt from it.
A valuable thing that can do is spend some time training your moral attention. There are many ways to do that, from reading literature (as a philosopher Martha Nussbaum recommends) to meditate (as The Buddhists who use).
Personally, I have benefited from both techniques, but one thing I like about meditation is that you can do it in real time even while reading the news. In other words, it does not have to be just something you do in case of news consumption: it can be a practice that changes as Pay attention to the news.
Even as a journalist, I find it difficult to read the news that it is painful to see stories of people who suffer: I finish feeling what they use “compassion fatigue”. But I have learned that it is really a miser. It should really be called “empathy fatigue.”
Compassion and empathy are not the same, we just think about combining concepts. Empathy is when you share other people’s feelings. If other people feel pain, You feel painAlso, literally.
It is not so with compassion, which is more about feeling heat towards a person suffering and being motivated to help them.
Practicing compassion makes us happier and helps us make other people happier.
In a study published in 2013 in the Max Planck Institute In Leipzig, Germany, the researchers placed volunteers in a brain scanner, showed horrifying videos of people who suffer and asked them to empathize with patients. The FMRI showed activated neuronal circuits centered around the insula in our cerebral cortex, exactly the circuits that are activated when we are suffering.
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 illuminated brain circuits: those for love and warmth, of the guy who feels for a child.
When we feel empathy, we feel we are suffering, and that is annoying. The empathy of thought is useful for us to realize the pain of other people, ultimately, it can make it disconnected to help relieve our owners of anguish and can match severe exhaustion.
Surprisingly, compassion, because it fosters positive feelings, actually attenuates empathic anguish that can cause exhaustion, as neuroscientific Tania Singer has demonstrated In the laboratory. In other words, practicing compassion makes us happier and helps us make other people happier.
In fact, An FMRI study He showed that in very experienced practitioners, think of Tibetan Yogis, the meditation of compassion that implies wishing that people are actually suffering from triggering activity in the brain motor centers, preparing the supports of practitioners to the stay rooms in the brain scanner.
So how can you practice compassion while you read the news?
A simple Tibetan Buddhist technique called Tonglen Meditation trains you to be present with suffering instead of getting away from it. It’s a Various Steps Process When it is done as formal meditation in the session, but if you are doing it after reading a news, you can only take some to do the central practice.
First, you let yourself get in touch with the pain of someone you see in the news. While you explode, imagine you are breathing your pain. And while exhaled, imagine that you are sending them relief, warmth, compassion.
That’s all. It does not sound much, and, by itself, he won the people who suffer from the ones you read. But it is a dress essay for the mind. When doing this mental exercise, we are training to keep us present with the suffering of someone instead of resorting to “the pleasure of feeling the distance between oneself”, as he said. And we are training our moral attention capacity, so that we can then help others in real life.
I hope you consume the news in moderation, and that when you consume it, you try to do it while practicing compassion. With luck, you will feel like those Tibetan Yogis in the brain scanner: energized to help others in the world.
Bonus: What I am reading
- There is a pond that recently cools a relief from my own news induced anxiety. That’s all This whore from Wendell BerryAnd it’s about how to “enter the peace of wild things that do not tax their lives with complaint ancestor.”
- I enjoy this piece in psyche in “Why is it possible to be optimistic in a world of bad news. “Explains the opinion of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that although ours is not a perfect world, it is so full of suffering, it could still be the optimal world.
- This week’s question about the consumption of news led me to visit the work of the French philosophers of the twentieth century. Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillardlistening to episodes about them in the Philosophy bites Podcast. They argued that the media feed us from reality, and the real ones make us more disconnected from the world because we forget that we are receiving an imitation and not real. Listen!
