Facing Crisis Fatigue

We’re coming up on two years since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

We’re 100 days into Hamas’ disturbing attack on Israel, and the devastating Palestinian civilian genocide that’s followed.

And many of us have moved on.

These crises are beginning to be eclipsed by China’s threatening posture toward Taiwan, the Iran-backed Huthis’ attack on international shipping, and the perpetual news cycle of the 2024 presidential election.

We’re susceptible to crisis fatigue.

The world presents us with a constant barrage of distressing events. But paying attention to them comes at an emotional cost.

It’s easy to escape to the trivialities of a TikTok feed. And to treat headlines of human suffering like they’re a video we can swipe up in impatience or boredom.

How do we manage our responsibility to engage these moments within our limitations?

Our awareness of bad news has multiplied exponentially. But we haven’t.

Now, in many ways, we’re more insulated from death and suffering than previous generations. Living in the first world with modern medicine has protected us from the rates of infant mortality, famine, and plague that have characterized much of civilization.

But this also means that the everyday suffering faced throughout history can feel foreign. We’re not primed to expect it. And while most of this experience in the past would have been contained within the proximity of local communities, we’re now exposed to death and destruction on a global scale.

There’s more information in one edition of The New York Times than the average person living 200 years ago would have come across in an entire lifetime. And with the speed and scale of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, information will not be slowing down any time soon.

But our organic brains and human souls can only attend to so much with feeling and purpose.

Processing more distressing information than we can handle can lead us into two dangers. The first is:

The more bad news we digest, the more anxious we become.

This is not only a modern problem. In the book of Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth (or “The Preacher”) notices, “He who increases knowledge increases sorrow” (Ecclesiastes 1:18).

But the knowledge he describes comes from lived experience in the world. The book documents Qoheleth’s observations of the joys and wonders and perplexities and injustices of life under the sun. The longer one lives, the heavier the burden of knowing that everything is vanity.

Today, our knowledge of the pain that happens under the sun comes not through the accumulation of years but with the immediacy and constancy of the Internet. And this is clearly more than we are capable of processing in a meaningful way. Attempting to do so will leave us anxious and depressed.

But there’s a danger on the other end of the spectrum:

The more mundane that crises become, the less they affect us.

In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr cites brain research showing that empathy requires focused time to develop. Understanding what someone is experiencing, feeling the moral freight of it, picking up on the subtleties and nuances, responding with compassion—these involve neural processes that are “inherently slow.”

The rapid rate we receive updates of suffering taking place around the world is not conducive to empathy. And yet we cannot simply not care.

I don’t think this is a tension that’s easily resolved. But there is help available to us.

The seemingly infinite updates we manage require infinite resources. We need something beyond ourselves.

A secular age that has vacated the transcendent does not equip us to engage the scale of human tragedy that confronts us. Nor does it give us any reason to believe that it matters. What ultimate value or purpose do we have in an accidental, expiring universe?

But there is God.

Here again, the ancient wisdom of Ecclesiastes guides us. This is how the book concludes:

“My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. 13 The end of the matter: all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. 14 For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (Ecclesiastes 12:12-14).

Much study is a weariness. There’s an implicit warning about taking in too much information. It’s ok to recognize our limits and moderate our news diet accordingly. We cannot ignore the world around us, for that is folly. But a deeper folly comes when we lose ourselves in the noise. Ecclesiastes reminds us of our essential identity and duty as image-bearers.

Fear God. This describes a Godward orientation in life. We bring our full selves—all of our emotions and concerns and finitude—to God. Prayer grants us a global reach. It enables us to have a mysterious effect on people and conditions that are otherwise too distant or too complex to help on our own. We do more than pray, but we do not do less.

Keep his commandments. Leaning into God does not mean disengagement from the needs of the world. The second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. A key theme in this author’s portrait of the meaningful life is to do the works of justice (4:1-12). We’re responsible for bringing remedy to the broken realities around us. But we’re not alone in this.

For God will bring every deed into judgment. Everything will go under review. Everything that has marred God’s beautiful creation and harmed his creatures. Nothing will be wasted or forgotten.

This is the day that the human heart, with its longing for limitlessness (3:11), aches for: the day when everything becomes clear, and it is shown how God has made everything beautiful in its time—even if in this life it just looks like ugliness and absurdity.

Today, under the sun, we face the next crisis. With wisdom, tears, and hope.