Somewhere between the disastrous floods that killed 22 people in Eastern Australia earlier this year and Putin’s threats of WWIII, I started avoiding my phone. It had become the bearer of constant bad news and my capacity to summon an empathetic response had all but dried up. I was suffering from what the internet has dubbed “worry burnout”, what clinicians call “compassion fatigue”, or what I like to bark at my long-suffering husband: “How much more of this can we take?!”
It wasn’t that I didn’t care about those who had lost their homes to record-breaking floods or the Ukrainian women fleeing wartorn cities, leaving their husbands behind. Of course I did. But in the aftermath of one disaster after another, I had become exhausted, angry and cynical; I couldn’t handle one more tragic headline. Even with the looming threat of a world war, our capacity for catastrophe has a limit.
