Indifference In a World of Difference
Preface: I normally write about space stuff. However, given a few conversations I’ve had lately, I thought it’d be meaningful to share some of my world view and how I keep myself sane day to day in an insane world. If you want to see more of what I normally talk about, I talk far too much on Twitter, located here.
How does one cope with the state of the world today?
No, I mean, seriously. How?
The world is more interconnected than ever, that goes without saying. In the modern day, we’re expected to process the triumphs and tragedies of every corner of the world as if they were our own. Every issue is connected to every other issue, every opinion easily meets a polar opposite, and we’re all exposed to a constant stream of it, 24/7, in the incomprehensible mess we love and call the Internet.
Hell, if you’re someone like me, born after the year 2000, you grew up with the Internet. Maybe you remember a couple years without those hell bricks we call phones, but beyond some early childhood memories, they were always there. A great novelty at first, but one that quickly gave way to an unfiltered and often unmonitored view of everything the world had to offer. Good or evil, awesome or horrifying, you-name-it, we-got-it. To pull a line from Bo Burnham, could I interest you in everything, all of the time?
Let’s narrow it down and talk about the current day. It’s Sunday, February 12, 2023 as I write this. The Superbowl has just finished (and the Chiefs won). The death toll of the earthquake in Turkiye has topped 33,000, the United States has shot down now the fourth unidentified object intruding on NORAD (US/Canadian) airspace, a derailment of a train carrying toxic materials in Ohio has supposedly poisoned a vast area, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine rages on, careening towards its second year with no sign of stopping.
This is but a tiny view of the world today as it appears to an observer in southern California. A specific observer, as well. I’m young, I have a specific interest in aerospace, I’m trans, born to two immigrants, Jewish, relatively well connected, and had somewhat of a rough and relatively poor upbringing, though things are somewhat better now. There are more factors, but for brevity I’ll leave it there.
My neighbor certainly has a different view of the world. So do my parents, who had moved from Israel to avoid having their kids drafted, yet remain staunchly Zionist — an issue we don’t see eye to eye on. And so do their parents, who moved from Spain, Morocco, and Egypt to escape discrimination and in some cases, outright fascism. As for theirs? You try tracing a Jewish family into the 1930s.
Our world views are born from the limited time we have to interpret our surroundings. As the age of the Internet proceeds, those surroundings grow vast and wide. Today, we are at the very least truly national citizens, if not to some extent global. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. But maybe we should get an idea of the senses of scale involved.
You are a single human. You have some kind of family by blood, whether you care for them or not. You have friends, lost them, and will gain new ones. Maybe you have a partner, or a job. You’ve influenced something, you’ve got stories to tell, memories that are truly yours. If you could possibly tell someone everything unique to you that has happened in your life… well, it’d literally take a lifetime.
Maybe you live in a city. Take a walk to the nearest transit stop, and go somewhere, anywhere. Even just during that walk, look at everyone around you. They all have their own stories to tell. They have lives. That person you just brushed past may have done the coolest thing you could’ve possibly imagined yesterday, but you can’t know that, and so you move on.
As you hop on say, a bus, take a note of everyone around you. They all have stories too. If you’re lucky, one may strike up a conversation with you, and share them. They’ve got opinions, and a world view. As you’re en-route to wherever you’re going, look outside. Every home and every building is somewhere someone has spent vast sums of time of their life in. Memories, good and bad, more than you could possibly imagine, flying past you, impossible to access.
This gets intimidating quick.
Douglas Adams wrote about this in the second installation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when he created the Total Perspective Vortex. For the uninitiated, the Vortex is a machine that forces one to witness and process a model of the entire Universe, with an impossibly tiny dot simply saying “you are here.” In effect, this would cause the victim’s mind to collapse, more or less killing them.
We can, to some extent, experience this in our reality as well. Astronauts commonly speak of the “overview effect” — a mental state incurred by viewing Earth from space, that leaves one in a state of awe and generally overwhelming emotions towards the irrelevance of our day-to-day problems as one sees Earth as whole. While this certainly makes presenting the scales easier, our exercise from earlier can get close enough.
Even our little bus ride, if you sit and process it for long enough, was far too vast to truly conceptualize. Depending on where, you likely went past a few thousand people and their lives, and you could spend the rest of your life trying to document every person’s experiences and differences and run out of time far before you finished.
But, relatively easily, we can up the scale by a couple orders of magnitude. For under $100, you can grab a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, seeing about a combined 30 million people on your hour-long trip. Try to extend our exercise to even a percent of that, and you will fail.
What can we take away from this? That we’re meaningless, that the world is so much vaster than us that life is pointless, that nothing has any purpose and we’re too weak to possibly make a difference?
Not quite.
A more level conclusion to be drawn from this is that perhaps as individuals, we can’t process being exposed to everything. Sometimes, we can’t even focus on the issues that seemingly directly impact us.
Using myself as an example here, I’m a trans person. The state of transgender rights in the US is falling apart quickly. Logically it follows that I should be worried about this, and to some extent, I am. But I am also critically aware of the apathy of those around me.
It sucks to say it, but your average person is not going to significantly inconvenience themselves for a group they have never truly interacted with. You might be a Democrat, but are you going to show up and put yourself at risk when your district’s Republican attempts to legislate away the rights of someone you’ve never talked to? If you did, would it even matter? What about those around you? You might’ve boosted a tweet here and there, started a conversation online, but what have you genuinely done in the real world?
The answer, for a vast majority of people, is going to be not much. Maybe you participated in the nationwide protests and riots over George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police in 2020. But what about Tyre Nichols? What about Keenan Anderson, a Black high-school teacher and father, who was tased to death by the LAPD on January 3 of this year during a traffic stop? The average person around me doesn’t know of him, and he lived in my city. Do you? What about the innumerable others who faced similar fates?
Let’s say you’re reading this today, and the current topic, at least on national American news, are the airspace incursions by so-far unidentified objects, which most have accepted are some form of balloons. Less discussed, a train has derailed near East Palestine, a village in Ohio, carrying vast amounts of dangerous chemicals, principally vinyl chloride, a toxic chemical that is a precursor to PVC and boils at room temperature. A controlled burn has released vast amounts of it and other chemicals into the air, and many eyewitnesses have claimed mass media has vastly understated the true impact of the incident, with reports of widespread livestock deaths and accusations of a cover-up everywhere.
It follows that a common question from one to another would now be:
“Why are you talking about balloons and not the disaster in Ohio?”
Some will go one step further than this, too. Maybe the balloons are a cover up? What if Norfolk Southern, the company responsible, tied some radar reflectors to some weather balloon? What if it’s the government?
None of these are impossible. But the most likely answer to why attention seems to be on the balloons, and not Ohio, is far more fundamental than this. I propose a counter-question:
What if there weren’t any balloons? Do you genuinely think people would care more?
We return to an individual’s capacity to process global, or even national events. We all have been very recently subject to far more tragedy than our minds can comprehend. To attempt to even confront one piece of it: In the last 3 years alone, 1,120,691 Americans have died of COVID. 11 of which died today.
How do you begin to process that? If we can’t even process our neighborhoods, how can we add several orders of magnitude to that? If you’re mentally strong enough, think of one person dying. What family do they leave behind? Who is impacted by their death? What memories disappear with them, what relationships sever permanently, how much disappears all at once?
Can you even process one? Today’s eleven? A hundred, knowing that if you ever were to finish with just that, to get to all of the other hundreds would take 11,205 times more? You can do the math in your head, but I promise you it won’t compute in any way that’s meaningful to you.
To some extent, we are all still processing the trauma. Maybe we’ve started looking for someone to blame for the state of our world as it is today. Wouldn’t it be so simple to say it’s all one person, one ideology, one group’s fault? Isn’t it so enticing to be able to believe in an answer for it all? What if someone thinks you’re the one at fault? Did you come out the other side better off, or worse off? Are you living your best life, carefree and happy, or do you sit there, in fear of the world around you, wondering if you’ll ever be able to step outside safely ever again?
These questions linger as we try to move on, perhaps remaining unresolved forever. As we do so, the world keeps going, and our global stream of information has no issue upping the ante to keep us hooked on tragedy. How do you feel about tens of thousands killed overnight in an earthquake in Turkiye? What about your tax dollars going to fight the war in Ukraine — and do you care to watch a sizzle reel of a consumer drone (that some of the people around you donated money for) drop a grenade on a Russian conscript’s head? Did you even stop to think about the living conditions in a poor African country, or the genocide in Xinjiang, or North Korea testing a record amount of ballistic missiles that hold the world at gunpoint? Or did I miss something awful you do care about, and you’re getting ready to call me out for it?
These situations suck. Literally. They are incomprehensibly awful in their own ways, but they will also suck the life out of you if you spend too much of your time trying to conceptualize them.
I hope that if one thing is clear by this point, it’s perhaps that humans were not really ever meant to try to process things on a global scale. Does that mean we need to tune the world out? Perhaps not even just our world, but our nation too? What if, like me, you’re someone whose very life might be held at stake by the state of the world, isn’t that awfully defeatist?
Well, what we can try to do is even out the balance between individual and world. Let’s start with a question that might be a bit easier and more uplifting to answer. What can we do?
What have we established so far? We’re able to conceptualize and impact complex situations, but largely only on scales that we can comprehend our role in. Well, this gives us a starting point.
Step one, perhaps, is to talk to somebody. No, not on the internet, where you can self select for people who will fit your self-built echo chamber and nothing more, but genuinely go talk to someone in real life. Maybe they’re a stranger. Maybe they’re family. But they’re someone, and if you’re talking to them, they’re willing to hear you out.
So, maybe there’s a big issue you’re worried about. Maybe, in my case, your rights are at stake, but you’re of a barely visible group whose existence to an everyday person is a nebulous figure, vaguely populated by hearsay. There’s a chance to go ahead and make yourself seen. Being vulnerable, face-to-face, is a difficult task, especially after we’ve all come from months or perhaps years of isolation and socializing online. But now, you’re that person on the bus, sharing their story to the individual trying to process the world. Of all the stories that flew past them, yours will stick, regardless of what they thought of it.
Perhaps beyond that, there’s some more you can do. The people immediately around you, your friends, your family, whoever they may be — how can you make sure they’re cared for? Can you make a difference in their lives? That’s a much easier thing to think about than the last few examples, isn’t it?
Or maybe, if you want to move up in scale a tiny bit, look at what’s local to you. What issues face your community? If you need the flow of information, can you maybe switch your source of news to a more local one — keeping an eye on what might actually have a chance to matter to you? If you’re looking to make an impact, is there a mutual aid group nearby that lets you help people around you? Can you genuinely make a difference here, and maybe on the way, meet some people who share that desire, even if you have little in common?
This is called building community. Organizing doesn’t have to be a grand effort to unite the masses, which is what being online inevitably leads your mind towards. Build small groups, and larger ones will follow suit.
To put it another way, the internet is a very recent invention. We have had global news for a while now, but it wasn’t the instant torrential flood that it is today, nor was it the infinite network connecting peer to peer across the planet.
Yet, before its advent, the world was hardly static. Ideologies with millions of followers rose to power and fell to ashes. Somehow, from the American colonies to the Soviet Bolsheviks, from the many French republics to the Carribean slave uprisings, and from the fascist Axis to decolonization in Africa, revolutions were organized, fought, and sometimes even won, changing the course of our world forever. Wars were waged, causes were rallied for, rights were lost and gained, and yet all this achieved with so much less awareness of the world itself, and so much more of the immediate.
Does that mean we need to completely tune the world out? That is up to you. But perhaps, as an individual, it doesn’t hurt to sometimes be indifferent in a world full of difference. Remember what they tell you to do in an airplane if it loses oxygen? You put on your mask before helping those around you. If you try to care about everything, you’ll burn yourself out and accomplish nothing at all.
Put what is immediate to you first — the people you love the most, the issues that impact you the most, and a focus for building a community to care and love for those around you. If you can accomplish that, perhaps you stand a chance at evening out the balance between you and the world, and ultimately truly make an impact where it’ll matter to you most.
