Every scroll is a summons:
Grieve this.
Be enraged by that.
Care, urgently, endlessly,
about things you cannot fix
and stories you cannot hold.

This is the empathy extraction economy:
where your attention, your outrage,
your heartbreak, and your guilt
have become commodities.

But the worst part isn't just
the emotional toll,
it's the confusion.
The endless feeds.
The conflicting headlines.
The erosion of trust in where to even look.

So we freeze.
We scroll past horror.
We shut down.
Because caring has become a full-time
job with no map and no off-switch.

Your empathy becomes erosion
when your exhaustion doesn't
only come from your own life,
but from holding the weight
of everyone else's.

It builds slowly. Not from one post
or one headline, but from the
relentless stream of sorrow.

And underneath it all, a quiet shame settles in:
Why am I so tired?
Why can't I care like I used to?
But this isn't apathy.
This isn't indifference.
This empathy stretched so thin,
it can no longer hold.

If you compassion has started
to feel more like a burden than a gift,
It's because you've been extracted.

And that feeling?
That quiet depletion?
It's a signal.

This is not about detaching.
It's about protecting.
Your empathy is not infinite.
Your nervous system is not invincible. Your compassion deserves boundaries,
not burnout.

Because the danger isn't
that you'll stop caring.
It's that your care will become
so diluted, so depleted,
that it can't land anywhere with depth.
That your heart will be stretched
so thin across too many screens,
it won't now what matters anymore.

You don't have to bleed to prove you care.
Caring deeply in a chaotic world
is an act of resistance.
But how you care matters."

• Dr. Zelana Montminy