We Need to Talk About Compassion Fatigue

One of my favorite podcasts, Triggernometry, asks the same final question of every guest: what’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be? Today’s answer is compassion fatigue.

Compassion fatigue is exactly what it sounds like—a person acts compassionately until a pattern wears them down. Readers will undoubtedly recognize this description in various areas of life, from that one family member with the steady stream of sob stories, or the high school friend who life constantly kicks around. The underlying theme is it’s never their fault, even when that person is a complete disaster magnet, and the epicenter of all the drama in their social and work circles. But the fatiguing characteristic is the endlessness of it all. And that’s where identity politics enters the arena.

Women are crushing men in education. They’re filling up doctor roles, winning more elections, making gains in a ton of directions. But not all directions, so every sex-based outreach program MUST go that direction. They get all the compassion, all the time, until activists find someone with better intersectional bonafides (more on that below).

Underrepresented racial minorities have had a rough history in America, as they have everywhere else, throughout all history. So plenty of us, myself included, shrugged at Affirmative Action, figuring it was a form of targeted reparations. But it’s been decades and not only has it not worked outside of the scions of rich people of minority heritage, activists have spent a decade scolding the rest of us for crap like “unconscious bias,” while reducing standards and punishments for people of color. Because compassion. Endless compassion. For the same group over and over, regardless of context or outcome.

Muslims are an interesting lot, as evidenced by the October 7th aftermath. There are nearly two billion of them controlling about fifty countries, many of them authoritarian theocracies, but most stories I see about them in the corporate press are pulling for more compassion. Usually at Israel’s expense, but the United Kingdom is making solid progress at indemnifying Muslim men against legal repercussions. See if you can spot a pattern on this map:

We can quibble over what it means to be a Muslim country, or the various nuances, and those are interesting enough, but what we can’t reasonably do is automatically assign victimhood status to Muslims, then forbid “punching down.” It’s been happening my entire life. The world has dumped billions of dollars into Gaza only to see their leaders steal it all, the population sit there in some weird purgatory, and terrorism flourish. But none of that matters. They need more compassion. How much? All of it. For how long? Forever. Even if they do horrible things? Yes, you bigot, even then.

The common activist response to compassion fatigue is an accusation of bigotry, which is equally fatiguing, and nonsensical to boot. Bigots aren’t affected by compassion fatigue. If you hate women, racial minorities, or Muslims, you never had any compassion for them to begin with. There’s no fatigue. For us non-bigoted normies it’s perfectly reasonable to ask for progress reports. To say, “We’ve been contributing to this special cause for decades, what outcomes has it produced?” It’s not bigotry to give someone money to make rent and then be angry when they spend it at Disneyland, and it’s certainly not bigotry to refuse further requests for rent money.

Any lefties that accidentally happen upon this essay will undoubtedly find it bigoted, privileged, even full of “hate speech,” whatever that is. I truly stopped caring. What finally broke my ability to post on Facebook was the Imane Khalif debacle of 2024, when a man beat the crap out of a bunch of women for a gold medal in boxing. This is where the lefties in my life decided that women were “out intersectionaled” and deserved no compassion. It had to go to a man claiming to be a woman. Again.

Yeah it was a real mystery what happened there. Super mysterious. Many mysteriousnesses.

The root cause of compassion fatigue, at least in the scenarios described above, is misplaced empathy. Misplaced not because no one in the groups discussed deserve empathy, but because not every individual inside those groups deserves it. Some women have it tough. They deserve compassion. Repeat for Muslims, Jews, men, gays, trans folks, atheists, Indians … as the philosopher Cheech Marin put it, things are tough all over. But by using group characteristics as the barometer for compassion, activists have created the perfect spawning ground for bad actors.

And now we’re all so tired.