There’s a pattern everywhere right now:
People who care passionately about suffering far away while neglecting the people right in front of them.
This isn’t new.
Charles Dickens nailed it in Bleak House with Mrs. Jellyby — obsessed with saving distant strangers while her own children lived in chaos.
What’s changed is scale.
Today, social media rewards abstract compassion:
- Caring about “humanity”
- Posting about global injustice
- Signalling moral purity to an audience
Meanwhile, local responsibility is:
- Invisible
- Messy
- Unrewarded
- Personally demanding
So attention drifts outward.
Why this happens (uncomfortable truth)
Distant causes are emotionally safer.
They don’t cry in your kitchen.
They don’t demand consistency.
They don’t expose your personal failures.
Abstract suffering lets you feel good
without having to be accountable.
Helping people close to you requires:
- Patience
- Sacrifice
- Ongoing effort
- Being seen failing in real time
So the ego makes a trade:
Identity over responsibility
Narrative over reality
Signalling over service
The moral inversion
Real ethics starts where:
- Your agency is highest
- Your impact is clearest
- Your avoidance is most tempting
If your compassion skips the places where you actually matter most, it isn’t virtue — it’s displacement.
Or more bluntly:
If you can’t be trusted with what’s near, why should we believe you care about what’s far?
A simple diagnostic
Ask this one question:
Are the people who depend on me better off because of me?
If not, global compassion may be functioning as:
- Ego regulation
- Status signalling
- Guilt management
—not moral action.
Final line (the sting)
Telescopic charity isn’t too much compassion.
It’s compassion redirected away from responsibility and toward identity.