I Would Rather Become Wiser Than Colder…
I have met many kinds of people in my life.
Some stayed. Some left. Some surprised me with their kindness, and some surprised me with their indifference.
Over the years, I have seen people become apathetic toward friends. I have seen friendships that once seemed inseparable quietly fade until two people who once knew everything about each other barely knew what was happening in each other’s lives.
I have even seen people become apathetic toward their parents.
Sometimes there is a story behind it. Hurt. Expectations. Childhood wounds. Distance. Misunderstandings. Things that an outsider may never completely understand.
But there is one kind of apathy that has always been especially difficult for me to understand: Apathy toward one’s own children.
Maybe because a child comes into this world knowing absolutely nothing about it.
Before they know society, they know their parents.
Before they understand what love means, they experience it through them.
Before they have anywhere else to belong, home is supposed to be their first place of belonging.
So whenever I see genuine indifference toward one’s own child, something inside me struggles to understand it.
And slowly, that question became bigger.
I stopped wondering only how someone could become apathetic toward their child.
I started wondering:
Why do we become apathetic at all?
Why does life make some of us care less instead of understand more?
Why apathy, when empathy is possible?
I think I understood one part of the answer a long time ago.
People are afraid of being fooled.
I remember once having a conversation with Lila Poonawalla.
She has helped many girls pursue their education, and something had always made me curious.
So I asked her a question.
I don’t remember my exact words anymore, but the question was something like:
“You help so many girls with their education. But what if some people are only pretending to be needy? What if some of them don’t actually need the help?”
I expected some complicated answer about verification or how they determine who genuinely deserves assistance.
Instead, her response was incredibly simple.
She essentially told me:
“It’s okay.”
If she helped a hundred people and twenty of them were genuinely needy, she was happy that she had been able to help those twenty.
What about the others?
What if some weren’t genuinely needy?
That possibility wasn’t enough to make her stop helping.
It was such a simple thought.
But somehow, it stayed in my heart.
Years pass. We hear thousands of sentences. Most disappear from our memory.
And then there are a few that quietly become part of the way we see life.
That was one of them for me.
Because imagine helping ten people.
Suppose eight of them didn’t actually need your help.
Maybe they exaggerated their circumstances.
Maybe they had other options.
Maybe someone even knowingly took advantage of your kindness.
You could look at those eight people and say,
“See? This is exactly why I shouldn’t help anyone.”
And perhaps no one could blame you for feeling that way.
But I would think about the other two.
What about them?
What if those two genuinely needed you?
What if one of them was a student who could continue her education because somebody decided to help?
What if someone was going through the worst financial period of their life?
What if someone simply needed one opportunity?
What if something that felt small to you changed something enormous for them?
If I helped ten people and only two genuinely needed me, I would still be glad that I helped ten.
Because those two mattered.
And even if there were only one —
that one person mattered too.
I think I would find it much harder to live with the opposite possibility.
Imagine somebody genuinely needed help.
You could have helped.
It would not have destroyed you. It would not have taken something essential away from you.
But you didn’t help because somewhere along the way you had decided:
“People lie.”
“People fake things.”
“People take advantage.”
And perhaps this person wasn’t lying.
Perhaps this was the one person who really needed someone.
That possibility affects me far more than the possibility of occasionally helping somebody who didn’t deserve it.
I would rather be disappointed sometimes than become incapable of recognizing genuine need.
And help, of course, is not always money.
Sometimes people need five minutes.
Sometimes they need someone to listen.
Sometimes they need information you already have.
Sometimes they need a recommendation.
Sometimes they need someone to teach them something.
Sometimes they need encouragement.
Sometimes they need forgiveness.
Sometimes they need another chance.
And sometimes all they need is one person to notice that they aren’t okay.
It can be as simple as:
“Are you okay?”
And then actually caring about the answer.
We experience kindness from the giver’s side, so we often underestimate it.
Five minutes feels like five minutes to us.
A small favor feels like a small favor.
One phone call feels like one phone call.
But we have no idea what that moment looks like from the other person’s side.
Maybe everybody else had ignored them.
Maybe they had been silently struggling for months.
Maybe they were beginning to believe nobody cared.
And then somebody did.
You may forget what you did a week later.
They may remember it for the rest of their life.
And that brings me to something else I think about often.
There are more than eight billion human beings alive on this planet today.
Eight billion lives.
Eight billion different stories happening simultaneously.
People falling in love.
People becoming parents.
People graduating.
People losing jobs.
People building businesses.
People sitting beside hospital beds.
People celebrating birthdays.
People grieving.
People worrying.
People hoping tomorrow will be better.
And before these eight billion people, there were billions more.
They lived lives that probably felt just as important and complicated to them as ours feel to us today.
They had homes.
They had careers.
They had money.
They had relationships.
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They had arguments.
They worried about what other people thought about them.
They became jealous.
They became angry.
They held grudges.
They wanted more.
Some became extraordinarily wealthy.
Some became powerful.
Some became famous.
Most simply lived ordinary lives.
And eventually, they all left.
One day, so will we.
I don’t find that thought depressing.
I find it strangely liberating.
Because it reminds me of something we forget while living:
Everything is impermanent.
Our youth is impermanent.
Beauty is impermanent.
Money is impermanent.
Our possessions are impermanent.
Our careers are impermanent.
Our homes are impermanent.
Our problems are impermanent.
Even the version of ourselves that exists today is impermanent.
Everything changes.
Everything passes.
And suddenly, against something as enormous as time, ego looks incredibly small.
Why spend such a temporary life making another temporary human being feel insignificant?
Why hold back a kind word?
Why make someone beg for affection that costs us nothing?
Why refuse compassion simply because somebody, somewhere, once took advantage of ours?
Why choose apathy when empathy was possible?
I don’t think most of us will be remembered by the world.
A hundred years from now, strangers probably won’t know our names.
And strangely, that doesn’t bother me either.
Because perhaps being remembered by the world was never the point.
Maybe what matters is being remembered by the handful of lives that crossed ours.
Someone will remember what it felt like to be around us.
A child may not remember every toy their parents bought, but they will remember whether they felt loved.
A friend may forget every conversation but remember who answered the phone when their world was falling apart.
A student may forget an entire semester but remember the one person who believed in them.
Someone struggling may remember the person who helped them without making them feel small.
People may forget our clothes.
Our salaries.
Our job titles.
Our houses.
Our accomplishments.
But tenderness has a strange way of surviving in memory.
We remember who stayed.
Who listened.
Who noticed.
Who encouraged us.
Who was gentle with us when we were already struggling.
And unfortunately, we also remember the people who could have cared but chose not to.
Still, I don’t believe empathy means destroying yourself for other people.
That isn’t kindness either.
I can care about you and still say no.
I can understand you and still disagree with you.
I can forgive you and still decide that I cannot have you in my life.
I can help people without allowing them to exploit me.
I can have compassion and boundaries at the same time.
Maybe that is one of the most important lessons adulthood teaches us.
The answer to being too naive is not becoming cold.
It is becoming wise.
If someone takes advantage of my kindness, I want to learn from it.
I want better judgment.
I want stronger boundaries.
I want to recognize patterns sooner.
But I don’t want that person to have enough power over me to change the fundamental way I look at humanity.
I don’t want someone else’s cruelty to steal my kindness.
I don’t want someone else’s dishonesty to make me suspicious of every honest person.
I don’t want someone’s lack of empathy to destroy mine.
I want life to make me wiser, not colder.
Because among the eight billion people alive today, I know apathetic people exist.
There were apathetic people before us.
There will be apathetic people after us.
And throughout my own life, I will probably meet many more.
Life itself may give me a thousand reasons to become one.
People will disappoint me.
Some will misunderstand me.
Some won’t appreciate what I do.
Some won’t return my kindness.
Some may even take advantage of it.
But I don’t want other people’s choices to determine the person I become.
No matter how hard life gets, I want to choose empathy.
Not blindly.
Not without boundaries.
Not because everyone deserves unlimited access to me.
Not because I believe everyone is good.
But because I want to be able to live peacefully with the person I see in the mirror.
If I help ten people and only two genuinely needed me, those two mattered.
If I am kind to ten people and only one remembers that kindness during the darkest period of their life, that one mattered.
If I make one person’s journey slightly easier when I had the ability to do so, that matters to me.
I cannot help eight billion people.
None of us can.
Maybe that was never our responsibility.
Maybe our responsibility is much smaller.
What do we do with the few human beings whose lives happen to cross ours?
For however long they stay.
A lifetime.
Ten years.
One year.
One conversation.
Maybe even five minutes.
Everything is impermanent.
Eventually, all of us will leave.
But while I am here, I know what I want to choose.
I would rather risk being disappointed occasionally than become incapable of caring.
I would rather have boundaries than walls.
I would rather become wiser than colder.
And if life gives me a thousand reasons to become apathetic, I hope I can always find one reason to remain empathetic.
Because sometimes:
one is enough.
