effort

[Sorry about my bad grammar and so on. I’m not the best writer. I hope my rambling isn’t too indecipherable.]

The ruling class has always sneered at idealism, empathy, bleeding hearts and sentiment. The values of these powerful people leak out and infect the general population at various levels throughout history. Every so often there seems to be a call to arms from the rich and powerful for the populace to harden their hearts. As recent as 2025 Elon Musk, the wealthiest man alive as of writing, stated in an interview, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Never mind that such a statement is objectively false, (as it is pretty self-evident that, say, the enslavement of African Americans most likely was not done from a place of empathy and rather from a desire for free labor). Yet I find myself wondering that even if most people find Elon Musks statement laughable, how many of us actually pathologise empathy in a similar way, even those of us that call ourselves leftists?

I have been noticing an increasing habit of the general population to demonise the sentimental, the emotional, the empathic, the idealist. The common theme among this pathologising is associating sentimentality with the inability to ‘let go’. This theme increasingly bubbles out of the cultural zeitgeist and into our media and politics. Sentimentality is paired with memory, with the past and the past is always treated as something to discard, to let go of and to be forgotten. But is this healthy? People seem to just assume it is without really thinking about what is being touted. Human progress, it’s future, is built on the foundations of the past. The future is built on the shoulders of those before us and without looking back on this past foundation with respect, humanity is almost ironically in danger of being forced to rediscover the lessons of the past over and over. A fitting problem for a hyper capitalist society that individualises people to the point of alienation. We refuse to learn from the lessons past as much as we refuse learn from each other. The coloniser would love the people who lost their land to ‘let go’ and ‘stop dwelling’ on that injustice! The capitalist would love you to ‘let go’ of your favourite old bike that you have been repairing for years and ‘move on’ to the self driving taxi, you sentimental, nostalgic old fool!

I might be using ideas like empathy, sentimentality and nostalgia too interchangeably but it is my belief that things like idealism, empathy, memory and sentimentality all come from a similar place in the human mind. The part that connects sense of self with community, belonging and humanity. A desire for safety. A desire to reflect on the things that worked as much as those that did not. 'I remember, I see the marks I left on Earth, therefore I existed'. The term nostalgia itself originally was used to describe soldiers becoming sentimental for home. Imagine that! Pathologising those experiencing life or death situations for missing home!

Perhaps we are being trained to abandon our sentimentality. To forget the safety of the nest in our hearts and think only in the present. To never expect to feel safe in our community. To never look upon things in our lives with the expectation of warmth. Maybe it’s to make it easy to not reflect on the terrible things we are witness to and are asked to do. After all, if one lives solely in the loop of the present, they cannot use their past experiences to inform their future actions. They cannot be inspired by past voices to improve those ideas that brought them to said present. You cannot strive for a happy future if you can’t even remember what happiness felt like!