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Understanding how empathy can immobilize us like that is a critical step for helping others — and ourselves.

Empathic distress explains why many people have checked out in the wake of these tragedies

Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.

The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients.

when two neuroscientists, Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer, reviewed the evidence, they discovered that “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer. Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it.

Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring.

In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion.

empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.”

Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”

When you see others in pain, instead of causing you to get overloaded and retreat, compassion motivates you to reach out and help

Dr. Singer and their colleagues trained people to empathize by trying to feel other people’s pain. When the participants saw someone suffering, it activated a neural network that would light up if they themselves were in pain. It hurt. And when people can’t help, they escape the pain by withdrawing.

To combat this, the Klimecki and Singer team taught their participants to respond with compassion rather than empathy — focusing not on sharing others’ pain but on noticing their feelings and offering comfort.

A different neural network lit up, one associated with affiliation and social connection. This is why a growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is healthier for you and kinder to others than empathy:

“Empathy is biased,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. It’s something we usually reserve for our own group, and in that sense, it can even be “a powerful force for war and atrocity.”

The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it.

in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.

To figure out who needs your support after something terrible happens, the psychologist Susan Silk suggests picturing a dart board, with the people closest to the trauma in the bull’s-eye and those more peripherally affected in the outer rings.

Once you’ve figured out where you belong on the dart board, look for support from people outside your ring, and offer it to people closer to the center.

Even if people aren’t personally in the line of fire, attacks targeting members of a specific group can shatter a whole population’s sense of security.

If you notice that people in your life seem disengaged around an issue that matters to you, it’s worth considering whose pain they might be carrying.

Instead of demanding that they do more, it may be time to show them compassion — and help them find compassion for themselves, too.

Your small gesture of kindness won’t end the crisis in the Middle East, but it can help someone else. And that can give you the strength to help more.

ver since, Luddite has been a derogatory word—shorthand for one who blindly hates or doesn’t understand technology.

Now, with nearly half of Americans worried about how AI will affect jobs, Luddism has blossomed. The new Luddites—a growing contingent of workers, critics, academics, organizers, and writers—say that too much power has been concentrated in the hands of the tech titans, that tech is too often used to help corporations slash pay and squeeze workers, and that certain technologies must not merely be criticized but resisted outright.

what I’ve seen over the past 10 years—the rise of gig-app companies that have left workers precarious and even impoverished; the punishing, gamified productivity regimes put in place by giants such as Amazon; the conquering of public life by private tech platforms and the explosion of screen addiction; and the new epidemic of AI plagiarism—has left me sympathizing with tech’s discontents.

I consider myself a Luddite not because I want to halt progress or reject technology itself. But I believe, as the original Luddites argued in a particularly influential letter threatening the industrialists, that we must consider whether a technology is “hurtful to commonality”—whether it causes many to suffer for the benefit of a few—and oppose it when necessary.

“It’s not a primitivism: We don’t reject all technology, but we reject the technology that is foisted on us,” Jathan Sadowski, a social scientist at Monash University, in Australia, told me. He’s a co-host, with the journalist Ed Ongweso Jr., of This Machine Kills, an explicitly pro-Luddite podcast.

The science-fiction author Cory Doctorow has declared all of sci-fi a Luddite literature, writing that “Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.

The New York Times has profiled a hip cadre of self-proclaimed “‘Luddite’ teens.” As the headline explained, they “don’t want your likes.”

By drawing a red line against letting studios control AI, the WGA essentially waged the first proxy battle between human workers and AI. It drew attention to the fight, resonated with the public, and, after a 148-day strike, helped the guild attain a contract that banned studios from dictating the use of AI.

But only a handful of cancers—of the breast, lung, colon and cervix—have screening tests recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force

Many companies are developing blood tests that can detect cancer signals before symptoms occur, and Grail’s is the most advanced. A study found it can identify more than 50 types of cancer 52% of the time and the 12 deadliest cancers in Stages I through III 68% of the time.

There’s a hitch. The test costs $949 and isn’t covered by Medicare or most private insurance.

The trouble is that this cancer is almost never caught early. There’s no routine screening for it, and symptoms don’t develop until it is advanced. Mr. Royse, 64, had no idea he was sick until he took a blood test called Galleri, produced by the Menlo Park, Calif., startup Grail. He had surgery and chemotherapy and is now cancer-free.

Mr. Royse visited Grail’s website, which referred him to a telemedicine provider who ordered a test. Another telemedicine doctor walked him through his results, which showed a cancer signal likely emanating from the pancreas, gallbladder, stomach or esophagus.

An MRI revealed a suspicious mass on his pancreas, which a biopsy confirmed was cancerous. Mr. Royse had three months of chemotherapy, surgery and another three months of chemotherapy, which ended last February. Because pancreatic cancer often recurs, he gets CT and MRI scans every three months. In addition, he has signed up for startup Natera’s Signatera customized blood test, which checks DNA specific to the patient’s cancer and can signal its return before signs are visible on the scans

Grail’s test likewise looks for DNA shed by cancer cells, which is tagged by molecules called methyl groups that are specific to a cancer’s origin. Grail uses genetic sequencing and machine learning to recognize links between DNA methyl groups and particular cancers

The test “is based on how much DNA is being shed by tumor,” Grail’s president, Josh Ofman, says. “Some tumors shed a lot of DNA. Some shed almost none.

ut slow-growing tumors typically aren’t shedding a lot of DNA.” That reduces the probability that Grail’s test will identify indolent cancers that pose no immediate danger.

Grail’s test has a roughly 0.5% false-positive rate, meaning 1 in 200 patients who don’t have cancer will get a positive signal

Its positive predictive value is 43%, so that of every 100 patients with a positive signal, 43 actually have cancer

the legislation’s price tag could reduce political support. According to one private company’s estimate, the test could cost the government $39 billion to $145 billion over a decade. Mr. Goldman counters that analysts usually overestimate the costs and underestimate the benefits of medical interventions.

Because Grail uses machine learning to detect DNA-methylation cancer linkages, the Grail test’s accuracy should improve as more tests and patient data are collected

regulators may balk at approving the test, and insurers at covering it, until it becomes cheaper and more reliable.

How would the FDA weigh the risk that a false positive on a test like Grail’s could require invasive follow-up testing against the dire but hard-to-quantify risk that a deadly cancer wouldn’t be caught until it’s much harder to treat? It’s unclear.

some experts urge the FDA to require large randomized controlled trials before approving blood cancer tests. “Multicancer screening would entail tremendous costs and potentially substantial harms,” H. Gilbert Welch and Tanujit Dey of Brigham and Women’s Hospital wrote

Dr. Welch and Mr. Dey also suggested that companies should be required to prove their tests reduce overall mortality, even though the FDA doesn’t require drugmakers to prove their products reduce deaths or extend life. Clinical trials for the mRNA Covid vaccines didn’t show they reduced deaths.

One alternative is to rely on real-world studies, which Grail is already doing. One study of patients 50 and older without signs of cancer showed that the test doubled the number of cancers detected.

One recurring problem he has seen: “Epidemiologists are always getting cancer wrong,” he says. “Epidemiologists a decade ago said U.S. overtreats cancers. Well, no, the EU undertreats cancer.”

A 2012 study that he co-authored found that the higher U.S. spending on cancer care relative to Europe between 1983 and 1999 resulted in significantly higher survival rates for American patients than for those in Europe

By his study’s calculation, U.S. spending on cancer treatments during that period resulted in $556 billion in net benefits owing to reduced mortality.

He expects Galleri and other multicancer early-detection tests to reduce deaths and produce public-health and economic benefits that exceed their monetary costs

Expanding access to multicancer early-detection tests could also help solve the chicken-and-egg problem of drug development. Because few patients are diagnosed at early stages of some cancers, it’s hard to develop treatments for them

the positive predictive value for some recommended cancer screenings is far lower. Fewer than 1 in 10 women with an abnormal finding on a mammogram are diagnosed with breast cancer.

Mr. Royse makes the same point with personal force. “I would be dead right now if not for multicancer early-detection testing,” Mr. Royse told an FDA advisory committee last fall. “The longer the FDA waits, the more people are going to die. It’s that simple.”

The simplest way of outlining the ideal university policy toward protest is to say that it should protect free speech, respect civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law

universities should protect the rights of students and faculty on a viewpoint-neutral basis, and they should endeavor to make sure that every member of the campus community has the same access to campus facilities and resources.

That also means showing no favoritism between competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities

Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.

Noise limits can protect the ability of students to study and sleep. Restricting the amount of time any one group can demonstrate on the limited open spaces on campus permits other groups to use the same space.

Civil disobedience is distinct from First Amendment protected speech. It involves both breaking an unjust law and accepting the consequences.

In a 1965 appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the principle perfectly: “When one breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly — not uncivilly — and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness

reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are indispensable in this context. Time, place and manner restrictions are content-neutral legal rules that enable a diverse community to share the same space and enjoy equal rights.

Administrators and faculty members will often abandon any pretense of institutional neutralit

For many administrators, the very idea of neutrality is repugnant. It represents a form of complicity in injustice that they simply can’t and won’t stomach. So they nurture and support one side. They scorn the opposition, adopting a de facto posture that says, “To my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

In March, a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest, and briefly occupied the building. The university had provided ample space for protest, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students had been speaking and protesting peacefully on campus since Oct. 7.

But these students weren’t engaged in free speech. Nor were they engaged in true civil disobedience. Civil disobedience does not include assault, and within hours the university shut them down. Three students were arrested in the assault on the security guard, and one was arrested on charges of vandalism. More than 20 students were subjected to university discipline; three were expelled; and one was suspended.

The University of Chicago has long adhered to the Kalven principles, a statement of university neutrality articulated in 1967 by a committee led by one of the most respected legal scholars of the last century, Harry Kalven Jr. At their heart, the Kalven principles articulate the view that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”

Stealing wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to do. It just happened to be the easiest way to stop the tension.

The first time I made this connection was in first grade, sitting behind a girl named Clancy. The pressure had been building for days. Without knowing exactly why, I was overcome with frustration and had the urge to do something violent.

I liked Clancy and I didn’t want to steal from her. But I wanted my brain to stop pulsing, and some part of me knew it would help. So, carefully, I reached forward and unclipped the bow. Once it was in my hand, I felt better, as if some air had been released from an overinflated balloon. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t care. I’d found a solution. It was a relief.

Together we went through the box. I explained what everything was and where it had come from. Once the box was empty, she stood and said we were going to return every item to its rightful owner, which was fine with me. I didn’t fear consequences and I didn’t suffer remorse, two more things I’d already figured out weren’t “normal.” Returning the stuff actually served my purpose. The box was full, and emptying it would give me a fresh space to store things I had yet to steal.

“Why did you take these things?” Mom asked me.I thought of the pressure in my head and the sense that I needed to do bad things sometimes. “I don’t know,” I said.“Well… Are you sorry?” she asked.“Yes,” I said. I was sorry. But I was sorry I had to steal to stop fantasizing about violence, not because I had hurt anyone.

Empathy, like remorse, never came naturally to me. I was raised in the Baptist church. I knew we were supposed to feel bad about committing sins. My teachers talked about “honor systems” and something called “shame,” which I understood intellectually, but it wasn’t something I felt. My inability to grasp core emotional skills made the process of making and keeping friends somewhat of a challenge. It wasn’t that I was mean or anything. I was simply different.

Now that I’m an adult, I can tell you why I behaved this way. I can point to research examining the relationship between anxiety and apathy, and how stress associated with inner conflict is believed to subconsciously compel people to behave destructively. I believe that my urge to act out was most likely my brain’s way of trying to jolt itself into some semblance of “normal.” But none of this information was easy to find. I had to hunt for it. I am still hunting.

For more than a century, society has deemed sociopathy untreatable and unredeemable. The afflicted have been maligned and shunned by mental health professionals who either don’t understand or choose to ignore the fact that sociopathy—like many personality disorders—exists on a spectrum.

After years of study, intensive therapy and earning a Ph.D. in psychology, I can say that sociopaths aren’t “bad” or “evil” or “crazy.” We simply have a harder time with feelings. We act out to fill a void. When I understood this about myself, I was able to control it.

It is a tragic misconception that all sociopaths are doomed to hopeless, loveless lives. The truth is that I share a personality type with millions of others, many of whom have good jobs, close-knit families and real friends. We represent a truth that’s hard to believe: There’s nothing inherently immoral about having limited access to emotion. I offer my story because I know I’m not alone.

the model’s calculations took into account trends in pollution levels, population growth, the amount of natural resources and the overall quality of life on Earth. The model’s predictions for the worsening quality of life and the dwindling natural resources have so far been unnervingly on target.

“At around 2020, the condition of the planet becomes highly critical. If we do nothing about it, the quality of life goes down to zero. Pollution becomes so seriously it will start to kill people, which in turn will cause the population to diminish, lower than it was in the 1900. At this stage, around 2040 to 2050, civilised life as we know it on this planet will cease to exist.”

Alexander King, the then-leader of the Club of Rome, evaluated the program’s results to also mean that nation-states will lose their sovereignty, forecasting a New World Order with corporations managing everything.

“Sovereignty of nations is no longer absolute,” King told ABC. “There is a gradual diminishing of sovereignty, little bit by little bit. Even in the big nations, this will happen.”

Rising inflation has led to surging prices for groceries, cars and many essentials. The cost of a college education has skyrocketed in two decades, with the average student debt for federal loans at $37,000, according to the Education Department. Overall debts for Americans in their 30s jumped 27% from late 2019 to early 2023—steeper than for any other age group.

home prices have risen considerably, while wages haven’t kept pace.

“What Dave Ramsey really misses is any kind of social context,” says Morgan Sanner, a

She began paying off $48,000 in student loans (a Ramsey do) and also took out a loan to buy a 2016 Honda (a Ramsey don’t). Her rationale was that it was safer to pay extra for a more reliable car than a junker she could buy with cash. S

he feels these sorts of real-life decisions don’t factor into his advice.

When she saw a comment from Ramsey online about how people receiving pandemic stimulus payments were “pretty much screwed already,” Israel felt it came across as shaming people. The pandemic shutdowns ended a decadelong economic expansion for Black Americans, a disproportionate number of whom lost their jobs and relied on those checks.

“Moralizing financial decisions is very damaging to marginalized groups,” says Israel, who is Black.

Many young adults scratch their heads over his advice that people should let their credit scores dwindle and die.

People need a good credit score, says Mandy Phillips, a 39-year-old residential mortgage loan originator in Redding, Calif. She uses TikTok and other social media to educate millennials and Gen Z about home buying. Scores are vital when applying for mortgages and rentals.

She also takes issue with Ramsey’s advice to only obtain a home loan if you can take out a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage with a down payment of at least 10%. Few younger buyers can pay the large monthly bills of shorter-term mortgages.

“That may have worked years ago in the ’80s and ’90s, but that’s not something that is achievable for the average American,” Phillips says.

Housing is a particularly hot-button topic. He advises people to only buy a house with their lawfully wedded spouse. Yet many young adults are pooling their finances with partners, friends or roommates to buy their first homes. 

Ramsey is perhaps best known for advocating a “debt snowball method”: People with multiple loans pay off the smallest balances first, regardless of interest rate. As you knock out each loan, he says, the money you have to put toward larger debt snowballs. Seeing small wins motivates people to keep going, he says.Conventional economic theory would be to pay off the highest-interest loans first, says James Choi, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, who has studied the advice of popular finance gurus.

Ramsey’s save-not-spend message sounds logical, young adults say. It’s his all-or-nothing approach that doesn’t work for them.

Kate Hindman, a 31-year-old administrative assistant in Pasadena, Calif., who has taken an anti-Ramsey stance on TikTok, ended up with $30,000 in credit-card debt after she and her husband faced income-reducing job changes. They’ve since turned it into a consolidation loan with an 8% interest rate and pay about $1,200 a month.

She wonders if the debt aversion is generational. Perhaps younger people are less willing to make huge sacrifices to be debt-free. Maybe carrying some amount of debt forever is a new normal.