Why Is Compassion So Hard?
Could better meaning help us increase our compassion?
As human beings, we have limited “body budgets.” Whether we like it or not, we each have a constrained amount of energy and time that we can give to any activity, including the activity of considering someone else’s suffering and feeling compassion for them.
Our limits on compassion can become even more constrained by very simple things like, a lack of sleep, being ill, or suffering from chronic pain. Test how extensive your feelings of compassion are for others the next time you’ve got a serious fever or you’ve thrown your back out or you haven’t slept well for a week.
This is the first important and humbling starting point to acknowledge: As much as we might like to feel compassion for every human being on the planet, our capacity for experiencing emotional compassion is fundamentally limited by our energy and the number of people in the world. Feeling compassion for people we don’t like, or who are actively attempting to harm us, takes even more energy.
Further, even the most caring among us can be challenged to feel compassion, even for someone we love, if that person is annoying or insulting. Feeling compassion for someone who is emotionally triggering us is incredibly difficult and can take a staggering amount of energy to overcome. Ask any person in a long-term relationship how hard it can be to summon a loving feeling or even to touch their partner when one is feeling hurt and angry.
This is the second critical and sobering point to acknowledge: All of us can be fairly easily triggered into emotional states that make it difficult, or nearly impossible, to feel compassion for another person, even if that person is our beloved friend or family member.
Many humans are challenged by their experiences of traumatic events. Scientific research has shown that these traumatic experiences leave profound and lasting emotional and physiological wounds that can deeply impact people’s ability to extend compassion to others. You may have also heard the term, “intergenerational trauma,” which refers to how traumatic experiences are passed from parents to children, perhaps over multiple generations.
Given all of these sobering limitations on our ability to feel compassion, why isn’t the world in worse shape than it is? Why isn’t every interaction in the world completely ruled by the opposites of compassion: Human conflict and violence?
Again, the answer starts with energy. Conflict is a high-energy and high-risk activity. Fights are emotionally exhausting and, if they come to blows, also physically punishing. By starting a fight, we could lose our jobs, hurt our reputations, and face financial penalties. This is why most humans have to be pushed into a situation where they believe they have no other option before they consider using violence.
So where does meaning fit into all of this? Meaning can be a very powerful force that either expands or contracts our willingness and perhaps even our ability to feel compassion for other people. If my meaning system tells me that some people are more violent or less human than me, it gives me permission to avoid feeling compassion for them.
From an energy perspective, it makes sense that we humans have created meaning systems that exclude and dehumanize others, because it helps us conserve our precious energy. It’s a lot easier to feel compassion for a smaller group of people. In addition, by becoming part of an exclusive group, we often tend to gain more deeply meaningful experiences of belonging.
Fortunately, there are also meaning systems that challenge us to expand our capacity for compassion, to “love our neighbor,” to “be merciful to others on the earth,” or to “show compassion for all living beings.” It’s just that these types of meanings tend to be weak because they’re often more intellectual beliefs than emotional or practical realities.
For those of you who may be new to my posts, I make an essential distinction between two basic types of meaning – meaning as intellectual understanding and meaning as emotional significance. “Practical meaning” is the integration of the two in service of developing pragmatic ways to reduce suffering and to increase the wellbeing of all life.
On the surface, modern society is very focused on intellectual meaning. Our schools, our workplaces and many of our other institutions are built on the belief that we need to achieve intellectual understanding and preserve and pass on this meaning to our young. Intellectual meaning is what we value as a society, and that is why we teach math and science to students every single day of every year of school, and it’s why we pay people with valuable intellectual understanding lots of money – doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.
But this is the essential problem with intellectual meaning that I have been attempting to address: While it is an important starting point, and very useful for some aspects of our lives, it doesn’t carry much weight when things get emotionally difficult, and especially when we feel unsafe or attacked by others (and we don’t have practice regulating our emotions).
People who are intellectually developed can get as emotionally triggered as anyone else. In fact, if one has dedicated most of one’s life to intellectual development and has given very little attention to emotional development, even more so. I speak from personal experience.
In some important ways, intellectual meaning is cheap from an energy perspective, especially when it comes to compassion. You can test this right now by saying, “I believe all people have basic human rights and are worthy of compassion.” Did that take much energy or effort? Probably not.
Putting our beliefs about compassion into practice takes more than intellectual understanding. If we each want to expand our individual capacity for compassion and if we want to live in a world with greater collective compassion, I suggest that the path forward is through cultivating higher quality emotional meaning and developing greater emotional maturity.
What might this look like? Well, the beautiful thing about emotional meaning is that we all crave it. We want our lives, our relationships, and our work to be emotionally significant. We want meaningfulness, which is the experience of emotional connection with the people around us. We can harness this energy to begin to make shifts in our personal and collective lives if we choose.
We can start by practicing compassion for ourselves and our limited energy. Try this: Check-in and give a number (1-10) to your energy level throughout the day. If you’re below 6 at any point, take action: take a break, a walk, do something fun, and/or get some healthy food.
Practice compassion with immediate family and friends and ask them about their energy levels. If you and a loved one are both below 6 energy, have an emergency plan to take care of yourselves and to avoid emotionally hurting each other.
Recognize how many of our institutions work against emotional meaning and start to change this. At school and at work, the implicit demand is that we put aside our emotional selves and act “rationally.” Find small ways to share your emotions with people you trust at work.
For our children who are still in traditional schooling, consider advocating for classes every day of every school year on how to engage with our emotions, how to build healthy relationships, and how to care for people around us. Have you noticed how much impact parents are having on schools lately? – why not advocate for more compassion?
For adults, we are also continuing to develop emotionally and psychologically and we also need ongoing classes on how to create and maintain healthy relationships, how to parent and be a good friend, and how to become more aware of our own emotions.
Meaning Journaling Prompts:
What beliefs do I have about who is more or less worthy of compassion? (Who do I see as “out” groups to my “in” group?)
Is there one group of people I have an especially hard time feeling compassion for? Why?
What are three ways I can be more compassionate with myself today?
What’s one way I can show compassion to someone in my life today?
Is there anyone I’m in conflict with? – What’s one small way I’m willing to show compassion for them?
Note: Sorry for the gap in my posts. I have taken some time away from substack because I’ve been struggling to make some meaning of the awful and distressing events regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. I wish you a Happy New Year.