Apathy's siren song

Fighting apathy with earnestness

The world is on fire. It’s also flooding and starving and seemingly imploding. Beyond the weight of current events is the unending access to all of its pain and chaos.

There’s a lot of rage on my corner of the internet, and rightfully so. Voices aren’t being listened to, the stakes are incredibly high, and we have to watch our worst fears be live-streamed onto TikTok.

I’ll see the headline of another bombing, another shooting, another natural disaster, another step backwards for human rights and I split into three incompatible states. One third enters a stage of rage that turns my body into a flushed furnace. The next third turns me into the Pixar’s Inside Out’s depiction of sadness; completely despondent and having all of the pain in the world immobilize me. The final third is often seduced by apathy.

Gustav Wertheimer; The Kiss of the Siren; 1850

She is pretty irresistible, don’t deny it.

Her siren song says “take a load off, rest that pretty head of yours, there’s nothing you can do, sink deeper into disconnection.”

Doesn’t that sound freeing? The weight being taken off of your shoulders. You are absolved of all sin and responsibility. No strings attached.

But we know that isn’t true freedom. It’s a coping mechanism born of hopelessness, feelings of powerlessness and not knowing what to do. It’s more tragic than rage or sadness; it’s giving up. It’s stepping away and delegating the pain to others. Rage and sadness are evidence of the humanity within us. These aren’t negative emotions; they’re just challenging ones.

We’re exhausted, but we all have a role in making the world a better place. There is no one way to have an impact. We are all connected. A small gesture of kindness, as innocuous as it may seem can create momentum in ways you could never imagine. Think about a time when someone’s action was unmemorable to them but deeply meaningful to you. The butterfly effect is a great metaphor to sit with when focusing on the impact of small moments. It’s how a small object can have a massive and unpredictable impact on a larger system. In this case, we are the small objects; the butterflies, and the system is our beautiful, dumpster-fire of a world *gestures to the window in an exasperated Larry David mannerism.*

I first began thinking about the butterfly effect after seeing the Broadway musical, The Story of My Life. Most of you have never heard of it because it opened and closed within 5 days… The story was about a successful author returning home to give the eulogy at his childhood friend’s funeral. It was a stripped down concept: two roles; one was the author and the other was the spirit of his friend who passed away. The lead sang a song about an early short story of his, called “The Butterfly.” In it, a butterfly discovered that the flapping of his wings kept his entire ecosystem thriving. Somehow, the intense earnestness of this piece didn’t not turn me off, but it was a simple, yet beautiful personification of the power of small gestures.

It’s definitely overwhelming out there, but any small step forward is better than succumbing into an immovable state. Maybe we can’t solve world hunger in a day, but we can start by buying someone a sandwich or by giving them our extra granola bar. Do what you can to resist apathy’s siren song. She may be seductive, but butterflies are sublime.