How Can Anyone Be Happy in a World Like This?
People fleeing from bomb-carrying drones, children trapped beneath rubble, millions of innocent deaths…
The answer is… ignorance.
Human beings have the ability to ignore facts about life, society, or the world under the excuse that they have nothing to do with them.
Ignoring the problems of someone you don’t know is much easier than worrying about the life of someone you’ve never even met. But is that right or wrong?
Honestly, no matter how much you worry about the people in Gaza, Ukraine, Arabia, or anywhere else facing a critical situation, worrying about them alone is useless. This may not be an ethical way of thinking on my part, but if you can’t do anything about it, what’s the point of making yourself miserable? That’s the first thing that comes to mind: better for one person to suffer than for two to suffer, right?
However, the more moral and ethical reality is quite different from what many of us might think.
An ordinary person, someone like you or me, who barely has control over their own life, can take one of two paths: ignorance, the easier one, or empathy. And here is an explanation of what each of them involves.
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First, there is the path of ignorance. It is the most common one, and no matter how empathetic you are, it is the path we all end up taking at some point, subconsciously.
It is easier to ignore the misfortunes of someone you don’t know, even if you are an empathetic person.
Think about it. When you feel sad about what is happening to these people, you feel empathy and anger at the injustice they are experiencing, don’t you? But for the rest of the day, you carry on with your normal life, ignoring these kinds of problems. I don’t blame you. I do it too, just like everyone else. Literally, almost every person in this world does it. It would be inhuman to carry the pain of others for so many hours every day.
As for the path of empathy, nobody truly knows what it means. Absolutely nobody. No one who has never experienced the same tragedies can fully understand what these people feel.
It is easy to put yourself in their shoes for five minutes, but you don’t spend the entire day thinking about their suffering. And if you do, it is probably because you think, “This could happen to me.” And that is not exactly the same as caring about them.
Therefore, for an ordinary human being, the first option seems to be the most common one, except, of course, for those who experience these tragedies firsthand.
So, which option is the most moral and ethical?
Exactly: there is no universal answer.
Suffering because of what they are going through will not help them at all, as long as there is nothing you can do to ease their pain, of course. There is a difference between an ordinary working-class person, who might at most donate a single euro to help fund the construction of drinking-water wells in Africa, and the president of a country. In that case, things are completely different.
