Why Care?

This post isn’t as motivated by current events as some of the others, but it’s an important question nonetheless. A lot of people have asked me WHY I do this: why I write about things so far away that have little, if any, impact on our everyday lives; WHY do I care? And I figured it would be interesting to investigate.

My first thought was “Maybe it’s scientific”. Aren’t people hard-wired to care about others? You can’t just be in the same house with someone and be completely unconcerned about their life and state of mind. So I Googled if humans were naturally inclined to be empathic, and this video came up. Take a look.

So yeah, we’re hard-wired to experience emotions and happenings that happen to others around us. Down to the neurological level, humans are programmed to react to others. Which is why we EXPRESS emotions, we don’t just hold it in. A feeling of sadness induces an action of crying, a feeling of happiness induces an action, which is smiling. When I see someone thousands of miles away suffering, I feel it too, and that’s how media requests for donations for organizations like UNICEF are so successful.

But I feel like there’s something more. Why do I care? Because something tells me that there are a LOT of things that happen everyday, that pass by unnoticed. Little things that could possibly add up to something big. Global warming for example. I was surprised to learn through a TED video that we all suffer from “landscape amnesia”–if changes happen slowly over a long period of time, it doesn’t register in our brain. We might soon look into a skyline and not remember that even a mountain vanished! That unknowing, or apathy, are what let Rwanda and Bosnia happen. And I don’t want to let something like that happen again on my watch. I am a strong believer in the fact that if we know more, we can care more. Not just numbers and statistics: if we understand someone else’s way of life, we’re more inclined to empathize with them.

This is why I care.