Everyone is Trapped in the Absurd - On Chaos & Compassion

Compassion is framed as a rational response to a shared human condition: everyone is caught in confusion, anxiety, and the absurdity of living inside a personal story while misreading other people’s motives. The core claim is that cruelty and certainty often come from the same place as the suffering they intensify—an easily inflamed impatience that turns minor friction into moral outrage, and random hardship into hatred. That pattern matters because it explains why kindness can feel like a cliché (“everyone should be compassionate”) yet still remains difficult to practice when emotions flare and blame feels satisfying.

Rather than treating compassion as mere agreeableness, the argument distinguishes it as sympathetic understanding—an awareness that others’ ignorance, annoyance, and even cruelty are sometimes mirrored in oneself. The text pushes back on the common tendency to treat one’s own distress as uniquely targeted while forgetting that everyone experiences the same dissonance of being alive: the roller-coaster of ups and downs, the struggle to make sense of life, and the constant effort to make the world feel coherent. Even when someone is genuinely wrong, the piece suggests that “who is right” is rarely clean; sometimes no one is, and the impulse to declare superiority—by noticing one’s own foolishness—can itself become conceit.

The essay also acknowledges limits. It does not demand softness toward every harm; it allows that some actions and people fall into categories requiring harsh scrutiny and appropriate response. Still, it argues that even when conflict demands firmness, a baseline compassion can remain relevant—because the underlying causes of behavior are shaped by luck, upbringing, and circumstances rather than pure choice. The world is described as having “no one in the driver’s seat,” with each person dealt a complex mix of good and bad fortune that forms who they become.

A philosophical anchor appears in the reference to Schopenhauer: people can will what they want, but they cannot fully will what they will—meaning self-mastery is constrained. That makes compassion hard not as a moral slogan but as a continuous practice requiring awareness of one’s own unawareness. Most people fail to sustain it, so the task becomes exponentially harder for everyone else.

The proposed antidote is not a one-time insight but an ongoing cycle of self-reflection and temperance. Each moment of noticing how difficult it is to be conscious—and how easily one slips into disdain—creates an opening to influence the pattern, even if only slightly. The lasting point is practical: use awareness of one’s own limitations as a source of compassion for others and for oneself, rather than as fuel for bitterness. In that sense, compassion is portrayed as a difficult, imperfect, but necessary way to live with the shared absurdity of human life.