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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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It is a sentiment that treats potential loss of life like rounding errors instead of tragedies (big and small).
Tolkien's words live in my brain
It is easy to choose not to care about anything, it is very hard to care about everything. I myself am dealing with having learned to turn my heart off to certain things. Things that would just be too overwhelming to carry.
A friend of mine died recently and it was incredibly shocking. He was much younger than me, I guess he was driving too fast on his bike. One of my first thoughts was that I could have been kinder to him. Maybe if I'd reached out more, stayed more consistent in his life, maybe he would have stayed more tempered.
We can't know what will happen to us nor the people around us. We can only dictate our words and actions. I, however, am much less kind than you — I hope that those who can't be bothered to exhibit the slightest bit of empathy are cursed to suffer in the ways they've been overtly willing to ignore. I hope they experience what it is to decay and have the world fade around them.
It would be poetic. Aneurotypicality is not an excuse for callousness.
I think it's easy to associate adhering to values with being unkind (those values could easily exhibit kindness, depending on what they are).
I just don't believe you're unkind. If you were, your values wouldn't tell you that we should shut down power to a neighborhood for a cat. You would just think something like 'glad that's not my problem' and move on. I don't think that people who are unkind are bothered by things like this, because again 'not my problem'. You have made it your problem by caring, and are thus precluded from being unkind (in my opinion).