I wish there was an easier way to change

The human mind experiences numbness in its sense-making and compassionate response to a subject, especially as the number of living beings suffering from a particular pain increases. Unable or unwilling to envision what so many people are going through, the brain gradually moves away from the subject.

This is not a surprising result, given that we already avoid even our own singular suffering and distract ourselves with a variety of colorful and pleasurable stimuli. The quote attributed to Joseph Stalin, "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic," is so apt that it targets precisely the center of numbness. While we can rage at the harassment of one woman and roll up our sleeves to find a solution, we can turn our backs on the suffering of thousands of women. Do you know how many people one has to see suffer in order to feel so little compassion?

According to research, unfortunately, the number is 2!

This incredible phenomenon has a name in psychology: Psychic numbing. It was first used by Dr. Robert Lifton, a psychiatrist who studied the psychology of Hiroshima survivors and other mass atrocities. What Lifton found is actually a description of an adaptive response state, in which a person becomes increasingly detached from their emotions when surrounded by loss, trauma and sadness.

At first glance, this is a natural response that allows one to continue to survive and even talk about feeling life without too much connection to the event, but it is also the basis of all defense mechanisms. When an experience is too horrible to make sense of, one uses all kinds of mental gymnastics to extinguish it. Suppress it, deny it, intellectualize it, make light of it.

When nothing works, one goes numb. We should not forget the feeling of inadequacy and alienation, which are the pillars of the numbing reaction. "No matter what I do, the result will not change anyway," our mind says. One immediately gravitates towards the option that is defensible and serves one's interests, ignores one's intrinsic values and clings to the needs that one assumes are important at the moment.

For example, someone who believes that protecting the environment is important and that burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment may find it more important to get there on a plane than to attend a meeting online and disregard all value judgments. But the psychic numbness that provides us with temporary relief can also have terrible consequences.

Just as when you ignore a pain you have experienced, a part of you that has remained silent for years may one day return to you as a disease, silence about social suffering can turn into a nightmare that narrows the avenues for solutions. Even when we watch videos of children and people begging for help, or witness tiny puppies being left in the forest and left to die, we may become unable to respond or find solutions. No administrative structure is exempt from this silence. Dozens of leaders who seem to have common sense may turn a blind eye to mass tragedies. To remain numb, to make no room for the experience of fear and despair, is a very tempting disappearance for us as well as for state administrations.

We go numb because we think that fear and despair are the end of the road, so we choose to run away from traumas such as pain and abuse without returning to them, without taking steps to remedy them. In our fantasy universe, everything is fine, but when the fireballs that are being thrown up from below start to burn our illusions, you can suddenly become the one feeding the problem, rather than the one running away from it. The stakes are obviously very high. Failure to overcome numbness, where our moral intuitions are incapacitated, may force us to passively witness the mass abuse and suffering of all living beings in another century, just as we did in the previous one.

So what is the way out of this numbness? This question is important because the world is now a place where there is too much suffering for us to save one creature at a time, and we need to find ways to address suffering more broadly.

The first step to any change is to become aware. This awareness is the same when you get a thorn in your hand or when there is an earthquake in a province of your country. We cannot make choices and find solutions to anything we are not aware of, and unfortunately, we are easily manipulated, detached or disconnected from reality in everything we are not aware of. I wish there was an easier way to change...