Somewhere along the way, without making a conscious decision, I realized my relationship with the world’s pain had changed. It didn’t happen in one dramatic moment. There was no morning when I woke up and declared, “That’s it. I’ve had enough.” It was quieter than that. More gradual. Almost like the slow dimming of a light at the end of a long day. I simply started noticing that when I was online—surfing the net, as we used to say—I didn’t want to read about cruelty anymore. I didn’t want to click on stories about harm done to others. I didn’t want to fill myself with someone else’s darkness.
Instead, I found myself pausing at headlines and whispering a quiet, weary question: “Why would you do that?”
Maybe, as we grow older, something changes in how we experience the world. When we’re younger, terrible stories are somehow easier to compartmentalize. They are news items, dramatic headlines, brief shocks before we move on to the next thing. But time has a way of softening us. Life has a way of teaching tenderness. Somewhere between losses, ageing friends, hospital waiting rooms, quiet funerals, and the thousand invisible heartbreaks life hands each of us, we begin to see differently.
Pain stops being abstract.
It becomes personal.
That child in the story could be someone’s grandchild. That grieving parent could be someone we know. That senseless act of violence isn’t a headline; it’s a phone call that will change a family forever. It’s an empty chair at Christmas. It’s a life that could have been so many other beautiful things.
And it hurts.
There was a time when my curiosity drove me to understand. I wanted to figure out the motives, the psychology, the “how could this happen?” Now I find myself less interested in the explanation and more struck by the simple grief of it. Perhaps wisdom doesn’t always come from understanding why people do terrible things. Sometimes wisdom grows from acknowledging that the hurt itself is real, and it costs us something to witness it.
People sometimes talk about becoming more fragile as they age. I don’t think that’s what this is. I don’t feel weaker. If anything, I feel more human. I think what happens is that the heart refuses to become numb. We spend years learning empathy—decades learning compassion—and then, finally, we reach a point where we can no longer treat suffering as entertainment. We no longer have the emotional appetite for outrage theatre or sensationalized misery. We begin choosing what enters our spirit, and we become gentler gatekeepers.
There is also fatigue in it. Not the tiredness of apathy, but the tiredness of someone who has seen enough to know how much these moments cost real people. It is the fatigue of a soul that has carried enough sorrow of its own and doesn’t wish to collect any more uninvited burdens.
And so, the question rises again: “Why would you do that?”
It is not the question of anger. It is almost a plea.
It is the question of someone who still believes we can do better.
We live in a world that encourages us to stay constantly informed, endlessly connected, perpetually scrolling. But there is a quiet courage in refusing to consume pain that doesn’t belong to us. There is wisdom in saying, “This hurts me—and I choose not to fill myself with it today.” That isn’t denial. That isn’t irresponsibility. It is spiritual hygiene. It is emotional self-respect.
Even as the world feels loud with cruelty, there is still goodness everywhere. There are still kindnesses happening quietly in grocery stores and hospital corridors and quiet kitchens where someone sits with someone else simply because they don’t want them to feel alone. There are still gentle people choosing compassion over contempt. There are still hands reaching out instead of closing into fists. Sometimes we must turn away from the darkness, not because we refuse to see reality, but because we know our hearts are still needed to feed the light.
Maybe this sensitivity that arrives with age is not a burden at all. Maybe it is evidence of growth. Maybe it is the soul saying, “I have learned what matters.” If we find ourselves moved more deeply, if cruelty wounds us more sharply, if harm unsettles something tender within us… perhaps that means we have not hardened. Perhaps it means life has sculpted us toward love instead of away from it.
And in a world that desperately needs tenderness, that doesn’t seem like a failing.
It feels like a calling.