Did you know that we are all apathetic? Seriously, we are. How many times do we shun old lovers for being true to the non-monogamous nature that we all have, and never care for the well-being of someone we shared so much with, simply because of our selfish and possessive instincts? How many times do we have a visitor, and when they leave we complain about how lazy, how entitled they are, and how they “should” live their lives independently away from us? How many times are we with a group of people saying negative things about somebody and we laugh saying, “Haha yeah yeah right on!” Yet the person we were speaking about comes in the room and we’re like, “HEY! Ol’ buddy ol’ pal!” Makes me sick! I include myself in this, not just pointing the finger. How many times do we stop associating with someone because of what someone told us about them, instantly putting them in a box, sent away to be shipped as “not in their right mind”. How many times has someone cried, and we pat them on the back saying, “Oh it’s okay sweetie, don’t be sad baby!” But then that person leaves and in the circle of “friends” everybody is snickering and chuckling at how sensitive, weak, and ridiculous someone is for crying? How many times do we want a break at work and cross our fingers for that hard to please customer or coworker to just not show up today? Apathy! Yes. Sadly, we live in a world of complete apathetic creatures, and you and I are one of them. Where supposedly we thought we taught empathy, but it is a teaching seldom carried out by those who learned it. Because it’s almost impossible to.
Here is a true story.
Last week I was sitting in the dark waiting for a friend. I was checking my phone and before I know it a man smoking in a wheel-chair approaches me. He starts talking to me and I do the whole stern, don’t smile too much, why is a stranger approaching me in the dark, this is dangerous body language. They eventually left but I was “polite”. But in my head I was like, “Wow my body instantly reacts with the possibility of a person being a danger or a con with... apathy”. We reason, well if we’re nice to a person they will want more and more from us and leave us broke. If we are nice to a person they will walk over us. If we are nice to a person, we will be the one working and them relaxing at home, because who are people when we NEVER tell them what to do? Who are people if they don’t feel we will ever react to their actions? We are completely walked over.
So there is this double-sided coin. The apathy we see in our day to day lives in regards to people who are doing nothing wrong, except we want someone to criticize or there is nothing to talk about. And apathy at the possibility of someone not being pleasing, productive, and harmless; or making progress towards that. Apathy that if we didn’t have results in cases where people have been badly hurt for being “naive, gullible”.
Oh empathy. We can have empathy for mankind as a whole. Beings who didn’t ask to exist or choose their body, mind, the world, or what it contains and were forced to adapt through reward and punishment in fear of death, painful consequences, and a desire for satisfaction of our five senses.
Empathy from a distance. Our nature is apathetic against those who are not pleasing, productive, harmless (or making progress towards that), related, or hand-picked by us to care for. Isn’t that right?
After all, how much do we expect from ourselves being liquid specimen and a ball of tissue combined? I say we have exceeded expectations in many, many ways. Just look around at all the buildings, art, institutions, everything. Yet there are things that if we were honest about would make us reconsider our actions and ways of living.
Genuineness. What is that? Nothing that can be done except in honest writing and speaking, because through our actions we show apathy to the inconvenient. We have our food, water, shelter, and resources that we don’t want to give out for free to preserve for our own. The rest is not our problem right? Sadly, this is a reality. A reality we can’t escape from for the sake of our own self-preservation, in the fear of not living, unless we lose that fear and we turn to altruism for the survival of our species or ideal, masochism, or ....... So self-preservation it is, my respects to the altruistic.
