Desensitization Over Time

I was at the grocery store and was exposed to something I’d always known to be true but never thought deeply about the implications of it.

I was in the produce section grabbing some salad kits and a woman was kneeling in one of the refrigerators. She was being supervised by another employee and being trained. As she was pulling out bag after bag of romaine lettuce, I overheard her ask a question:

“Wait, so what happens to all of this expired food? This is so sad.”

She’s right. It is sad. Yet, when we have the great privilege of going into a store and picking out whatever we want, it doesn’t make us sad. We hardly think about what happens to all of the food that goes bad. Maybe it’s something you keep in mind when you shop, maybe not. But in either case we’ve learned to accept that’s just the way it is.

Because this woman was in training and throwing away the food herself, she had a new perspective on it. Rather than being desensitized to the reality of the waste, she confronted it. And she allowed herself to feel it.

There are things throughout life that we just learn to tolerate over time. Things that aren’t ideal and violate our values, yet we don’t worry about them or do anything about them. What was impossible to understand becomes commonplace, and what we used to feel passionately opposed to becomes normal.

Some people create businesses and movements to address the problems they can’t stand to see in the world, but most of us don’t. Most of us just live our lives and forget about it. And that’s not a knock on you or me, but a reality of the human condition. Over time, we acclimate to our surroundings. We desensitize to issues and experience things less intensely because they become less novel.

My recommendation today is more challenging, but necessarily so. I don’t want you to grieve, but I do want you to allow yourself to feel more. Admit that some things are unfair, unjust, and unsustainable. Have a problem with the systems society operates within. Because when you do, you become a brighter advocate for what you want to see in the world, and in the smallest of ways, play a bigger role in fixing the problems you can’t stand for.

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