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For those of you who feel sad for strangers that you never knew existed until now, why not direct your feelings to something productive like looking through loc

For those of you who feel sad for strangers that you never knew existed until now, why not direct your feelings to something productive like looking through local obituaries and contacting their survivors to show some support and kindness? There are real human beings dying all around us but they don't have dramatic movie-style deaths so we don't care. Even better, don't wait till they're dead. Go and seek out old, sick, and lonely people and make them feel better. I think news-cycle internet sadness drains our capacity to care about others while also doing nothing for those who died or who're genuinely sad about it. The sinking submarine is interesting, the people on it aren't.

cgmg 9y ago
That sounds like a false dilemma.
- averagewall 9y ago
  Not false - we have limited capacity to care about people so we have to make tradeoffs. If anything, just because of the time it takes up. More people die each day than we could even name if that was our full time job. That's not even counting the possible emotional limits on people. So why not spend your limited caring on someone who's ignored by the world and didn't even put themselves in danger, even better if it's someone who's not a professional killer like these victims were.