This World Continues to Expose the One Thing Humanity Lacks: Compassion

Existing in a world that turns compassion into controversy is an exhausting trend we could all do without.

Photo by Zan on Unsplash

It is hard (if not impossible) to be engaged in the real world right now. Log into your favorite social media platform, and the first thing you’re going to see is the gore of war. Children being decapitated. Bodies crushed beneath rubble. Families screaming for god, for help, for anything that can relieve them.

Every country, every corner of the globe, is the center of some horror right now. Famines, floods, wars, pandemics. You name it, humanity brutalizing and being brutalized by the rough hand of nature. As we get pummeled and pummeled again and again by these crises, it’s not hard to see the empathy that is missing in so much of our “humanity”.

We are not a species that lacks creativity, that lacks genius. We don’t lack ambition, vision, or innovation. What humanity lacks, in this moment more than many others, is compassion.

We are a species that loves to hurt one another. We are a people who take glee in the extermination of our enemies. Closer and closer we hurdle toward the sun, and year after year, things remain the same. Can there be a change? Can we make a better tomorrow?

It’s hard to imagine such a future without a major change in society and its use of compassion as a whole.

What Is Compassion? What Is Empathy?

To understand what is lacking in our human societies, you must first understand what compassion is in the first place. It’s not enough to look around at the apathy that lingers everywhere. You cannot understand the absence of something you don’t fully acknowledge in the first place.

Compassion, you see, as a topic has been watered down in our modern world. Much like the word “empathy” it’s come to represent some kind of passive, soppy emotion. In our modern understanding, to be compassionate is to pity someone. But those 2 things aren’t even close to being the same.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, compassion is defined as “concern for the suffering or misfortune of…