“Don’t take on the stress of others” is advice (from Mark Sisson) that recently popped up in my inbox. I don’t take it to mean that we’re supposed to be as cold as a dead fish in the face of other people’s distress. If we can in any way help, we should do so, if our help is welcome. Sometimes it isn’t — and that’s all right. All we can do is to be gracious about offering our help as well as accepting a rejection.
Empathy and Outrage
Empathy is a precursor to any genuine wish to help that’s driven by the needs of the other and not the needs of the self. By itself, empathy may be enough to propel some people to act in order to rectify an injustice or remedy a problem in whatever way they can, whether big or small. People donate or volunteer. They protest peacefully. They educate themselves. They teach. They become activists. They work for genuine, positive change.
In others, empathy might trigger outrage, which can also be a catalyst for meaningful action. Oftentimes, though, it’s not. So much of the current outrage fest is just that – people taking on the stress of others, and making it their personal crusade. They’ll take their righteousness to the interwebz. They’ll post their opinions and hope for their posts to go viral – either out of a genuine wish to see their message spread for its content. Or because those thousands of “Likes” and “Retweets” feel oh-so-good. Social validation. Dopamine central.
This leads down a very slippery slope. It’s not just the wittiest, but often also the most radical, polemic, and nuance-free expressions that seem to find the biggest resonance. It’s not for nothing that our societies are getting more and more polarized. Social media – and, increasingly, the more traditional media – are pushing us towards the fringes. And for good reason. That’s where the prime targets for manipulation reside. Outrage sells.
And then there are those who feel genuine empathy, genuine sorrow over the misfortune of others, but who don’t feel that they can make a difference. In the face of so much injustice and suffering in the world, what can a single person do?
Some react like deer in the headlights. They can’t look, and yet they can’t not look. They’re glued to the news and their social media feeds, all for the sake of being an informed citizen. They let unfiltered negativity enter their lives without a plan for transcending it. And on top of that they feel guilty because others are suffering while their own lives are just peachy for the moment. The guilt of good luck. The guilt of privilege. There is such a thing as learned helplessness, and it can be a powerful drag on mental health.
Other people feel the same empathy, but they push it away. Deny it. Numb it. Shrug it off, and move on with their lives, secretly glad that they’ve been spared.
Writers and Empathy
How, we might ask, is all this relevant for us as writers in general and as writers of fiction in particular?
It’s almost a cliché: Writers are empaths. If we weren’t, all we’d ever be able to create would be cardboard cut-outs, not three-dimensional, relatable characters. How can we leverage our empathy? How can we use it in a beneficial way without letting negativity, guilt and helplessness harm our well-being?
As writers, we are in the persuasion business. We manage to make our readers believe – at least while they’re immersed in our stories – that the worlds we’ve created are real and meaningful. Whether we intend it to or not, our worldview colors our writing and thereby insinuates itself into the mind of the reader and might, just might, shift an opinion here or there.
Not everyone’s cut out to be an activist or an effective volunteer. The introverts among us might not be inclined to work with people. But we have our empathy. We have our powers of persuasion. We have our platform, be it our writing itself, our online presence, or our presence in the world. We can use them to nudge others to sit with the discomfort of entertaining a worldview different from their own.
Agency
What all this comes down to is what everyone tells us our protagonists need: Agency. Agency is the willingness to take responsibility and to act upon the knowledge that we’re not powerless. It’s knowing which things we can control, which we can influence, and which are entirely beyond our efforts. It’s also deliberately choosing where and how to meaningfully spend our time and energy without taking on the stress of others and making it our own.