That Week the Billionaires Hijacked my Empathy
This week, the internet—the keeper of our collective consciousness—kept pulling my imagination to the five people floating in a tin can in a most peculiar way.
I thought about their cramped legs. How desperate, angry, and terrified they were. Their constant hunger and thirst. Their exhaustion and claustrophobia and panic. The stale and likely foul air in the hull. On Tuesday, I imagined them taking turns banging on the walls of the submersible every thirty minutes. My chest tightened when I thought about them running out of oxygen. I imagined one of them making a sardonic quip about their situation, forcing a delirious laugh out of the others. Then I imagined the awful silence that followed.
When the debris was discovered, I shuddered at the violent, incomprehensible physics of the implosion and what that meant for those five bodies. But I was also relieved that the days of suffering I’d imagined weren’t real.
It’s been a bizarrely tragic week, and once again, social media has captured the absurdity while providing the context that heightens that same absurdity exponentially. Without fail, we quickly launched into a predictable dialogue and maybe lost some sleep staring at a blue-lit screen in a dark room.
But even with this predictable response, I found myself in a weird headspace all week long. Constantly consuming and processing tragedy has become a regular part of modern life; we are saturated with tragedy. So this week felt familiar, but also not. There was the grotesque experience of learning another terrifying way a human body can be destroyed. There was the deep empathy I felt towards what the passengers and their friends and family were suffering while also having no tender feelings towards any of them. There was the desire to learn what kind of industries supported the passengers’ luxurious lifestyles as if that would somehow justify their horrible fate. The ambivalence was overwhelming, and I couldn’t put it down or walk away from it. I had a nagging, can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it feeling all week.
The only comparable experience I can think of is when a stranger does something unnecessarily reckless—something that could violently break their body—near me. Like when a motorcyclist drives between two lanes of traffic on the interstate while ignoring the helmet law. It’s that fear, anger, and annoyance that someone’s senseless recklessness has become a part of my day. It’s the fear that I’m about to witness someone’s body go to pieces or that I might even be a part of that carnage. It’s my imagination (you know, that thing that we start calling intrusive thoughts as we age) getting away from me. It a desperate plea to the universe that another person’s thrill-seeking won’t traumatize me and the other motorists holding their breath. As my imagination kept going back to that lost submersible and how miserable its passengers must be, I felt that same sense of frustration. Like my imagination and empathy had been hijacked by a handful of billionaires on an ego-driven mission that I would never agree to myself. And with their thrill-seeking recklessness, they forced trauma onto our collective consciousness.
Extreme adventure tourism is a growing industry and it’s especially popular with the preposterously wealthy for obvious reasons. For starters, it’s very expensive. It’s a small number of people who can afford to be launched fifty miles into the mesosphere, helicoptered to an active volcano, led 29,000 feet up a snow-capped mountain, or dropped 2.5 miles down into the North Atlantic Ocean for little-to-no purpose other than “because I wanted the experience.” (I mean, these trips could also be dress-rehearsals for when the billionaires have to flee the planet they made unlivable, but I think that argument significantly changes the tone of this essay…so I’ll hold off.)
The empathy/resentment combo that I have for the OceanGate passengers is remarkably different from the legitimate empathy I feel when something tragic happens to people whose risky behaviors serve others or a greater purpose, or if they were born of desperation instead of ego. When news about OceanGate dropped, people immediately compared the Titan disappearance with the fishing trawler wreck off the coast of Greece that happened just days before. The fishing boat was filled with migrants seeking asylum and hundreds are believed to be dead. They were people taking risks to find better living conditions, safety, survival. The Titan was filled with five of the world’s wealthiest seeking adventure, bragging rights, ownership. One vessel was full of people fleeing wreckage–economic, civil, environmental–in hopes of finding stability. The other vessel was full of people fleeing the stability of their beyond-comfortable lives to seek a thrilling experience at a wreckage site.
People quickly compared the two tragedies, criticizing the clear disparity of media coverage, public interest, international response and resources between the two wrecks. If you’ve spent any time on social media, the conversations sparked by these comparisons were again predictable. Pearls were clutched, names were called, and we took our places on our respective sides of the dividing line.
The connections between the two vessels cannot be ignored, especially when these two tragedies viewed together capture the disgusting surrealism of the modern human experience. And especially when these two tragedies don’t exist separately; in many ways, they share a cause and effect relationship. The world that made the Titan possible also made that migrant boat necessary. The industries that support these extreme forms of tourism are the industries that are killing communities and species, bankrupting entire countries and ecosystems: energy, petrochemicals, agriculture, transportation. These men wouldn’t have $250,000 dollars to throw at a one-time, self-serving experience without the wealth inequality generated by some of the world’s most corrupt and destructive industries.
Most of us don’t need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have an over-confident b/millionaire take us to a hostile environment so we can look at a wreck symbolizing man’s hubris. Millions of people are already living in hostile environments, where the air is unbreathable, the water undrinkable, the homes unlivable or uninsurable, and the pressure immense. People living in frontline communities, industrial sacrifice zones, and geographically vulnerable places don’t need to be ferried to dangerous wreckage sites. They are in our backyards, our waterways, our peripheral vision. Our communities are flush with the wreckage of colonial and capitalistic audacity.
With billionaires getting richer and the planet getting smaller (for them), adventure tourism will likely continue to grow and push the limits of what is humanly possible. I’m wondering if this reluctant empathy/resentment combo will begin to feel more normal as more billionaires pay high prices to place themselves in hostile environments in order to break records, plant the flag, or create an impressive Instagram post.
And I’m also wondering if this conflicted feeling has a name–besides ambivalence. Psychologists and theorists love to name feelings, so it probably already has a name. If you know it, can you tell me? Maybe if I know the name of this new feeling, I will be able to put it aside and focus my energy and resources back to the wreckages I’ve become numb to.
