Empathy hurts in America. I think of the story about Siddartha Gutama, the Buddha, who was a prince. The first time he left his palace he sees a poor person, a sick person, and a dead person and he realizes that his fancy life of ease and pleasure has been a lie at the expense of others, and he has this sudden shock of empathy and renounces his former life to become a philosopher and try to understand the nature of life and the meaning of suffering.

In the US there are so many desperately poor people, homeless people, people suffering from mental illness, people suffering for no fault of their own. Trying to have empathy for everyone who suffers is painful and distressing because most of the time there's nothing you can really do for them. Sure, you can slip a homeless person a 20 or some cheeseburgers once in a while, but the big structural solutions that would really help people are always held beyond our grasp by the fucking oligarchs. And that hurts. it can be so easy to just turn your empathy off and ignore it all to protect your own psyche, and a lot of people do just that.