top of page
Search

The Global Burden of Uninvited Empathy

by Ram ben Ze’ev


The Global Burden of Uninvited Empathy
The Global Burden of Uninvited Empathy

The Internet was meant to connect the world — and it has. But in doing so, it has blurred the boundaries between awareness and intrusion, between caring and carrying. What began as an exchange of information has become a contest of opinions. Everyone feels compelled to speak on everything, everywhere, as if silence were an act of betrayal.


Social media has made this even worse. The platforms that claim to “connect” us have, in truth, dismantled the walls that once preserved our mental and emotional space. Built-in translation tools ensure that no language remains a barrier; the uninformed can now become universally audible. And because they can understand, they believe they must respond.



This compulsion to participate — to declare a stance on every global event, war, tragedy, or scandal — may seem harmless. Some even argue it’s virtuous. But it’s not. The constant influx of outrage and sympathy invites emotional burdens that are neither ours to bear nor ours to fix. What happens in distant lands begins to dwell within our own homes, hearts, and relationships, not because it should, but because we let it in.


This is not empathy; it is ego dressed as compassion. Genuine empathy is local — it starts where you can act, where your words or presence can change something. It is the neighbour you can comfort, the family you can support, the friend you can forgive. Anything beyond that is borrowed suffering, and it poisons the soul.


A sage once asked his students, “Do you love your friend?” One replied, “Yes, Rabbi, with all my heart.” The sage said, “Then tell me, what causes him pain?” The student paused and said, “I do not know.” The Rabbi smiled gently and said, “Then you do not yet love him — for to love is to feel his pain and to act with care until his burden becomes yours.” The same can be said of empathy: to care without truly knowing is to mistake emotion for virtue. Feeling for strangers we do not know, whose pain we cannot touch, is not love — it is illusion.



We were never commanded to absorb the pain of the entire world. To do so is to invite chaos into our own circles. It is written that “the heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy.” The wisdom is clear: each person has their own share of joy and struggle to contend with — not the world’s collective sorrow.


The Internet made the world small, but it also made us smaller — stretched thin across causes and conflicts that never needed our opinions. Every time we absorb a crisis through a screen, we multiply its echo in our own lives. And so we live heavy with distant grief, detached from our immediate reality.


We must learn to re-establish the boundaries of concern. To care without collapsing. To acknowledge without absorbing. To return to a more grounded sense of responsibility — one rooted in what we can touch, influence, and change.


Because true kindness, true empathy, begins not in the noise of the global crowd but in the quiet of one’s own home.




>>>> BUY ME A COFFEE <<<<


###


bottom of page