Turning away

From the WSJ

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-case-for-looking-away-from-suffering-87185bf9?mod=WTRN_pos6

The Case for Looking Away From Suffering

We’re told that constant attention is a moral duty, but averting our eyes can help us reflect and respond.

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By

Benjamin A. Saltzman

April 12, 2026 3:00 pm ET

A crucifixion scene by Fra Angelico. Benjamin A. Saltzman

Pope Leo XIV celebrated Easter Sunday with an admonition: “The cross of Christ always reminds us of the suffering and pain that surround death and the agony it entails. We are all afraid of death, and out of fear we turn away, preferring not to look. We cannot continue to be indifferent!”

While his call for peace and an end to the “globalization of indifference” is a vital message for our time, turning away isn’t always a sign of indifference. Walk through the Convent of San Marco in Florence, and you’ll see Crucifixion after Crucifixion in frescos by the 15th-century painter Fra Angelico. Alongside the spectacle of execution and the glimmering blood, Mary, John, St. Dominic and others beside Christ in many of these frescos cover their faces or turn away. They do so in grief and horror, but also in awe.

Such gestures aren’t given to figures who are apathetic or indifferent. They’re given to those buckling under the wretched weight of their surrounding world. They’re afflicted by this weight or recognize their responsibility in it or feel some combination of shame, remorse, disgust and grief.

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These gestures offer a lesson about our human condition. Consider how often we find ourselves turning away: As we pass someone on the street asking for help, we slightly avert our eyes. We scroll past the news of the war in Ukraine to news of war in the Middle East. Maybe we take a moment to feel a response, perhaps pity or anger. Maybe we’re moved to action or protest. More than likely, it isn’t long before our attention turns to another new injustice or scene of suffering. I believe most people are inclined to care, and to those who are so inclined, the prevailing message has been: Keep paying attention. Don’t look away.

We’ve turned “paying attention” into an empty moral performance. To confront the world’s suffering, we must reframe how we turn away—not to ignore, but to think, feel and act.

Since the second half of the 20th century, the urgency of attention has increasingly acquired a moral dimension. Our collective attention has been framed as an essential guardrail against atrocity and abuse of power. Looking away has become a metaphor for moral failure. But the real danger is indifference—and indifference is a product of not permitting oneself to turn away in reflection. It is a product of not permitting oneself to turn away in “difference” (a word whose Latin root means “to set apart” or “to carry away”).

In my research, I’ve studied how artists from antiquity to the present have used gestures of turning away to signify human confrontations with the most difficult aspects of life. I’ve learned that when we turn away, it often signals that we’re actually encountering something that requires our full emotional commitment.

The idea that meaningful and attentive engagement could come from averting your gaze may seem counterintuitive, but it translates to other basic forms of human interaction. A study by Sophie Wohltjen and Thalia Wheatley published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that when two people are in conversation, their eye contact is essential to maintaining coordinated attention, but periodically breaking eye contact is as important. It fosters independent thought, which allows the conversation to evolve.

René Descartes sometimes felt the need to close his eyes to think. Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that human reason prompts us to turn away from others’ suffering, for it is reason that overcomes the instinct of compassion. Hannah Arendt controversially argued that pity is an “all-devouring passion” that only feeds on affliction. Totalitarian abuses of power and the banal ascendancy of evil aren’t stopped with mere pity, she maintained, but with thoughtfulness. Arendt had written her dissertation on St. Augustine, who held curiosity to be dangerous, often tempting one to sin because of an insatiable hunger for one sight after another. Endless curiosity prevents contemplation.

Sustained attention doesn’t necessarily mean true engagement. Rather than trying to follow and spurring others to follow the dubious dictum “Don’t look away,” we should ask: “Why am I looking away?” This reflective process helps us direct our attention in healthier and more effective ways, and it brings us in touch with our own capacity to respond.

Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine and author of “Attention Span” (2023), observed in a conversation with me that “we cannot sustain constant attention, especially with disturbing images. Without pauses for reflection, attention becomes reactive rather than deliberative.” In today’s addictive media environment, mindless scrolling can feel like “paying attention,” justifying it as an ethical good. Yet it’s anathema to human flourishing.

Like Augustine’s friend Alypius, who despite his best efforts couldn’t resist the gore of a gladiator fight, we are transfixed by horror as a form of entertainment. Aristotle recognized that we take pleasure in viewing fictional representations of tragedies, suffering and mutilated corpses that would repulse us if we confronted them in reality. But the line is ever more blurred.

Today, many forces, corporate and technological, make it harder to look away. Compounding that effect is the message that we have a moral obligation to pay attention. Wide-eyed consumption of all the horrors we encounter on an hourly basis may look like attention, but it isn’t so different from indifference. At best, it’s a gateway to moral paralysis.

To be sure, looking away from suffering is a privilege of those not directly enduring it. Primo Levi, reflecting on his survival in Auschwitz, wrote that “there was no use closing our eyes or turning our backs, because it was all around us, in every direction, as far as the horizon.”

When you find yourself turning away, you should recognize it as a privilege that gives you the freedom to reflect. Instead of trying not to turn away, allow yourself to notice when you’re doing so. Turning away is rarely glorious or noble. But it’s deeply human. It’s how we grieve and think, feel shame and remorse. It’s how we recognize our complicity. It’s what prepares us to take responsibility and action.

Mr. Saltzman is an associate professor of English and director of the University of Chicago’s Program in Medieval Studies. He is the author of “Turning Away: The Politics of an Ancient Gesture.”

Other people

 

Dustin

@r0ck3t23

Elon Musk just told a story that should terrify every AI company on Earth. His son Saxon is autistic. Saxon couldn’t understand why the family went to restaurants. You can get the same food delivered. You can call your friends over. You can eat better at home for half the price. So why go? Musk: “He had an epiphany and said, ‘Oh, the reason people go to restaurants is to hang out with strangers.’” A kid who takes the world literally just decoded something the rest of us never thought to question. We like being around people we’ll never know. Look at what we already built. Delivery apps so you never wait in line. Remote work so you never share an office. Self-checkout so you never talk to a cashier. Every innovation of the last 20 years was a bet against human proximity. Every one paid off. Until it didn’t. Loneliness is now a public health emergency. Depression has doubled since the smartphone. The average American has fewer close friends than any generation in history. We didn’t remove friction. We removed the thing friction was hiding. Now look at what’s coming. AI agents that handle your emails. AI companions that replace your conversations. AI assistants that make every human interaction optional. Same playbook. Same bet. Except this time we’re not engineering out strangers. We’re engineering out humans entirely. The coffee shop where nobody knows your name. The subway where no one speaks. The restaurant where you’ll never see that couple again. Those aren’t failed connections. They’re the background radiation of belonging. We don’t just need people who know us. We need to exist in rooms full of people who don’t. That’s what a kid understood at a dinner table that billion-dollar companies still can’t grasp in a boardroom. We spent 20 years building a world you never have to show up to. AI is about to finish the job. And nothing it builds will ever replicate sitting in a room full of strangers and not feeling alone.

Sleep faster

 

https://x.com/Manifest_Lord/status/2056072280141447278?s=20

Japanese researchers found that pressing a specific point on your wrist for 60 seconds before sleep reduces cortisol by 34% and cuts the time to fall asleep in half.

It's been used in Japanese hospitals for 40 years.

It was never introduced to Western medicine. Read till end 🪡

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His name is Dr Yoshio Manaka.

Researcher and physician.

Tokyo University Hospital.

He spent 40 years studying how pressure applied to specific points on the body regulates the autonomic nervous system.

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His findings were published in Japanese medical literature in the 1980s.

They never made it to the West. Not because they didn't work. Because there was nothing to patent.

4

The point is called Nei Guan.

It sits on the inner wrist.

Three finger widths below the wrist crease.

Between the two tendons you can feel when you press gently.

You have had it your entire life. Nobody told you what it does.

5

When you press Nei Guan with firm steady pressure for 60 seconds the vagus nerve activates.

The vagus nerve is the direct line between your body and your brain's safety system.

When it activates it signals one thing.

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The threat is over. The nervous system shifts from sympathetic activation to parasympathetic calm.

Cortisol drops. Heart rate slows.

The brain receives the signal it needs to allow sleep.

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Manaka's research confirmed what Japanese hospitals had observed for decades.

Patients who used Nei Guan stimulation before sleep fell asleep faster.

Stayed asleep longer. Woke with lower cortisol levels than the control group.

No medication. No side effects. No cost.

8

The sleeping pills Western medicine prescribes do not solve this.

They sedate the brain.

They do not resolve the nervous system activation.

Which is why people on sleep medication often report waking unrefreshed.

The brain was sedated. It was not safe.

There is a difference.

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The practice Manaka documented:

Sit or lie down one to two minutes before you intend to sleep.

Place your thumb on the Nei Guan point of the opposite wrist.

Three finger widths below the wrist crease between the two tendons.

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Apply firm steady pressure.

Not painful. Firm. Hold for 60 seconds. Breathe slowly while you hold it. Then switch wrists and repeat.

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You do not need to believe it will work.

The vagus nerve does not require your belief.

Pressure on Nei Guan activates it the same way every time.

The way pressing a light switch works whether you understand electricity or not.

Your nervous system knows what to do with signal.

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The 34% cortisol reduction Manaka's team documented is significant.

Cortisol is the primary chemical keeping you awake. It is designed to keep you alert and responsive to threat.

At elevated levels it overrides every other signal your body sends toward sleep.

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A 34% reduction in 60 seconds is not a small thing.

It is the difference between lying awake for two hours and falling asleep in twenty minutes.

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This is what suppressed knowledge actually looks like.

Not a conspiracy.
Not a secret society hiding the truth.

Just a finding that produced no pharmaceutical profit.

So it stayed in Japanese medical literature.

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While millions of people in the West spent decades staring at the ceiling.

Taking pills that sedated them without ever making them feel safe.

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You have spent years believing your sleep problem was about you.

Your anxiety. Your overthinking. Your inability to switch off.

It was never about your mind.

Your mind was doing exactly what a mind does when the nervous system is in threat mode. It was keeping you alert.

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It was trying to protect you. The problem was never your thoughts. It was the signal your nervous system never received.

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Two thumbs.
Two wrists.
60 seconds each.

That is the entire practice.

Your body already has everything it needs to do the rest. It was waiting for a signal you never knew you could give it.

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Most people will spend tonight the same way they spent last night.

Lying awake.

Waiting for sleep to come on its own.

Wondering why their mind won't stop.

The rare ones will use what their body already has. And discover that the ceiling was never the problem.

The signal was.

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Try it tonight.

Press. Hold. Breathe.

60 seconds.

Expertise in kind vs wicked environments

Excerpt: 

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably....

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked.

Ihtesham Ali

@ihtesham2005

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived. Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear. His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range."

https://davidepstein.com/range/ The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence. Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it. Chess works that way. Most things do not. Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read. There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on. A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked. The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different. Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore. He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport. The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers. The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them. The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career. Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding. Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science. The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway. Match quality matters more than head start. A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose. The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath. The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was. If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in. You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

_____

ABOUT THE BOOK

What's the most effective path to success in any domain? It's not what you think.

Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.

David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see.

Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.