You Don’t Get To Look Away From Suffering

Even if you don’t have to wallow in it

Ryan Frawley
7 min readOct 30, 2022

--

Photo by Jordy Meow on Unsplash

Nothing is easier than closing your eyes

Nothing is easier than looking away. It’s never been easier to distract ourselves with a thousand blinking things. Or to live in electronic echo chambers that tell us only what we want to hear.

Even the best life on earth has its share of problems. There’s no need to go looking for suffering. It’ll find you sooner or later. And you, by yourself, aren’t going to save the world, no matter what you do.

But you can’t look away.

I had a meeting today

Or what passes for a meeting in this year of our Lord 2022.

It’s not something I do often. In fact, a huge perk of being an online freelancer is that I don’t have to interact with many people during an average workday. Usually none.

But as the golden age of content creation spins down to its end, a certain mania sets in. To get the money while it’s there to be gotten. In the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen demand for online writers so high.

Some things decline slowly toward their end, the whales singing songs about the last ship to sail over the horizon, never to return…

--

--

Ryan Frawley

Novelist. Essayist. Former entomologist. Now a full-time writer exploring travel, art, philosophy, psychology, and science. www.ryanfrawley.com