The Empathy Tax

I reserve a room at my library three days a week (two hour periods) specifically to write and work on the two books I’ve got going right now. I do this because it has now become near-impossible for me to focus on the craft of writing unless I’m in a soundproof room that is not in my house. I wish I were kidding.

On these days, I’m a monk. I’ve learned that I cannot look at Reddit, watch the Meidas Touch, the local news, read Substack, or engage in any social media before I leave for these writing sessions at the library. That’s because if I do, my brain will not settle enough to allow me to slip into the fictional worlds I’m creating. The external chaos we’ve collectively experiencing arrests my ability to create.

But unfortunately, a soundproof room doesn’t always soundproof your thoughts, so it still takes a concerted effort for me to regain focus and access my interior life.

I suspect I’m not alone in feeling like that interior life is under constant siege from individuals who are stupid, cruel, incompetent, and aggrieved despite being the most privileged people on the planet.

I also doubt I’m the only one who is also feeling all of this in my body, too. Those of us who care about what’s happening in our country and around the world are feeling sick. We’re hurting physically.

Our cortisol is continually raised as we look at images of butchered babies in Gaza; of fathers and mothers being kidnapped off the street in front of their children by ICE agents; at videos of Stephen Miller’s shrill Goebbels cosplay (“I’m hard core,” he squealed last week); of Donald Trump and his Benny Hill gang telling us that acetaminophen causes autism and that vaccines are evil, as infants die from whooping cough, and they make business deals with Pfizer. The list goes on.

Now consider the speed with which we are being asked to process the unthinkable.

This is something I’ve been studying in regards to climate change-related natural disasters and how the sheer pace of record-breaking catastrophes makes it impossible for human beings to fully grasp what is happening.

Do you remember the little girls who were swept away in the flash floods in Texas? Twenty-seven campers and staff died. That was just in early July. The Southern California Wildfires (also called the “Los Angeles Wildfires”)? The one where MAGA actor and noted climate change denier James Woods cried on national television about losing his home, but then doubled down on denial? (“This fire is not from 'climate change,' you ignorant asshole,” he told someone on X.)

What about Hurricane Helene? The one that nearly destroyed Asheville, NC and which the Republicans used to sow distrust in the Biden administration’s FEMA, resulting in broken people rejecting FEMA aid and even running FEMA workers off with shotguns? One year ago.

That’s just three of the climate disasters that have been exploited by politicians who experienced zero impact from them. Just three of the climate disasters we have been asked to process at warp speed.

There have also been mass shootings, political assassinations, violations of international law, racially motivated firings, performative deployment of our military in American cities, the disappearing of two-thirds of the immigrants detained at the cruelly, and stupidly, named “Alligator Alcatraz,” the weaponized imbecility and orchestrated grift of RFK Jr and crew, the government shutdown designed by Republicans to prevent a vote on releasing the Epstein Files and blamed on Democrats who are trying to stop the doubling of Americans’ insurance premiums (too late—letters started going out October 1st), and, most horrifically, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, made possible by U.S. tax dollars stolen from seniors and schoolchildren.

And that’s just what this ADHD mind can remember without notes on a Tuesday morning.

If you find yourself losing track of each horror, and you are a decent human being, this all feels very bad. It makes life feel cheap because we cannot fully acknowledge the victims of each of these psychopathic acts or of these unthinkable natural disasters.

It makes us feel powerless because we can’t do anything, alone, to stop it from happening. It makes us feel hopeless because there seems no end in sight.

All of this invades our minds, even when we are not watching the news or scrolling through Reddit. It stains all of our private thoughts. It saturates our daily existence. By design.

Maybe it takes a little bit longer to fall asleep or stay asleep these days. Maybe you find you’re not telling the people in your family you love them as much as you normally do, because every emotional fiber of your being is being stretched to its breaking point.

Perhaps you aren’t taking the time to notice the beautiful colors of the changing leaves this fall. Maybe you aren’t daydreaming during long drives like you used to. When you listen to music, you no longer escape into the memories it evokes because your mind is vigilant for news of what’s happened since the last time you checked: Who’s been hurt? What law has been broken without consequence? What other aspect of our national pride has been paved over? What other national institution has been defiled or American company has bent the knee to (and I still can’t believe I’m typing this name out) Donald Trump.

If any of this feels familiar, have you considered the fact that this is the interior life these people want you to be living right now? One filled with trauma, never-ending stress, outrage, and fear and a continual tax on your empathy?

That empathy tax is designed by these bad people to be regressive, but in reverse. Those of us with the most empathy pay the highest price while those with the smallest store of empathy pay nothing. Look around you. Note who is untroubled.

In this hour, empathy is any decent American’s Achilles’ heel. This administration understands on some level that human beings cannot process so many catastrophes and outrages at this speed. They know these events will simply blow past us, forgotten in weeks or even days. That’s because in a storm a hailstone plucked from the turbulent sky will melt through your fingers as you try to catch more.

This is an unnatural state of being. We have no evolutionary adaptations to lean on here and no historical parallels to consult.

As a result, the grief so many of us feel is not just in what is happening all around us. It’s that we cannot hold every violation of our common humanity in our hearts and our minds when they are committed at this speed and volume. We are aware that we can’t do this. And for good people, for empathetic people, this is a deeply painful reality.

The ruling class knows that the majority of people in this country are good-hearted, quick to help a neighbor, and capable of empathy, even those they have brainwashed into supporting their cruelty. They know this even though members of this class are none of these things. They only recognize goodness and empathy because in a kleptocracy, such traits are weaknesses to exploit.

On top of this is a coordinated and long-term effort by the CEOs of large social media companies to keep us living with our heads down looking at our phones, scrolling through mindless but addictive content, while they and their cronies plunder our future and our children’s futures.

They relentlessly push AI on us because it is designed to reduce our reliance on our own minds and to destroy our critical thinking skills. (That the rise of social media, big tech, and the surveillance state was coordinated in service to this specific outcome is an argument I increasingly find convincing. )

They certainly don’t want us creating anything, because human creativity cannot be controlled. It might open people’s eyes. It might encourage them to resist. It might demonstrate what beautiful things humans can create for other humans.

Art can destroy fascism, which is why the ruling class has tried to trivialize art as frivolous but has simultaneously worked overtime to convince us that AI can replace artists, comedians, novelists, and so on. (Spoiler: it absolutely cannot).

So they want to take away our ability and desire to think and to create. They do this by taking over our interior lives, filling it with horror and rage and leaving no room for beauty.

This is the ruling class’s one cool trick.

Well, I refuse.

Actually, let me restate that. I don’t just refuse. I fucking refuse. And you should, too.

I will not cede to them my entire attention. I will not admit them into my interior life nor will I let them keep me from creating art. Let each one of us stand on our personal Bridge of Khazad-dum, the narrow path that separates their manufactured Mines of Moria from our interior lives and inform this dime-store Balrog and his band of slavering orcs that none of them shall pass.

Sorry, that none of them shall fucking pass.

How do we do this? First, realize that you do not have to carry all of this on your heart all day, every day. Some of us feel guilty when we try to escape from the news. Know that there are millions of us who can shoulder the burden while you go into your own soundproof room. Know that you aren’t letting anyone down by escaping for a few hours, a few days, or even a few weeks. You aren’t showing that you don’t care; you’re demonstrating how much you do.

In this way you can wrest back your interior life from these invasive billionaires and autocrats whose tentacles reach out from their algorithms, tracking software, and surveillance systems to bind you to them.

You don’t have to create anything during these hours. You can just be. Take a walk without your phone, or with it turned all the way off (let family/friends know you will be unavailable for that stretch of time so they don’t worry). Spend time among trees. Highly recommend, by the way. Dig in your garden if you have one. Helping small green things thrive is grounding because Nature is patient but relentlessly moving forward. Read a comfort book written in a different time. (For me it’s Sherlock Holmes or Jane Austen.) Enter your interior life and reclaim it.

If you do create, ensure that you’ve created a buffer around you before you enter your soundproof room (a literal room or a soundproof room of the mind). Do not look at social media before your session. Do not watch television. Be ignorant of developments that have taken place overnight. Work concerns can be stressful but are of a different variety than the societal stresses we’re dealing with everyday, so if you need to check work email before starting, that’s okay (though of course far from ideal). Let your only concerns be making coffee, what’s for breakfast, feeding your pet, tidying up, taking your children to school, putting baby down for a nap, making tea, etc..

On those non-work mornings I am able to go to my soundproof room at my local library, I put my phone on Do Not Disturb1, I don’t watch TV, and I close all browser windows on my laptop. (Before I was disciplined enough to follow through I had installed an app called Freedom on my laptop that barred me from accessing the internet for a period of time I specified. It’s how I managed to write my novel South Pole Station.)

I walk outside to check on those two pears that unexpectedly fruited on my youngest pear tree. I feed the wild turkeys that hang out on my property and I fill up the birdfeeder. Then I get into that soundproof room and reclaim my interior life.

I listen to the voices of the characters I’ve created and I watch as they live out plot lines that seem to have already been written. And through them I process my pain and fear and rage and somehow it turns into art2. A beautiful but formidable weapon forged in my interior life.

My mind, and yours, is not theirs to colonize. Defending our attention and our imagination are acts of resistance.

These bad people can strip our children’s future for the parts with which they think they can build their Hunger Games-style neocameralist “mini-kingdoms.” They can try to drown us in horror. They can try to tax empathy out of existence. But they cannot touch our interior lives if we protect them.

I believe—no, I know—that if we guard those private and sacred places inside of us, where the work of being human is done, then the interior lives they think they’ve captured will become the force that destroys them.

Leave a comment

Share Solastalgia Supper Club