Surviving the Age of Cognitive Dissonance

How do we retain our humanity when things are falling apart?

I walked the dog around my mom’s apartment complex, a 55+ community. Her neighbors kept asking, without actually saying the words, if she was dead. There was no mention of her cancer, or brain surgery, or hospital stays. In Florida, the land of eternal retirement, such words are taboo, probably even sacrilege. People go there to live out their final years in peace, so drunk on the sun they can forget about the sorrows of their former lives. The palms are swaying and the pools are blue — to confront mortality is the ultimate sin.

The neighbors, none of them rich but all of them living, took a long glance after they recognized the dog, but not me. I wasn’t the first, or the second, or even the third person they’d seen walking the dog in the past few weeks. 

“Your mom, Rita?” asked one woman with short white hair, unsure if she guessed our relation right. “Is she…okay?”

From the other side of the road, I watched her own small, marshmallow fluff of a dog squat and begin to shit. “Yes, she’s okay,” I nodded.

I could’ve said more to fill the empty space, especially seeing the curtain of confusion and worry pulled across her face, but I learned a long time ago that other people’s discomfort with the truth is not my responsibility. Plus, where would I begin? She waved and moved on, accepting that “okay” was the only information I’d be giving, though neither of us were convinced what this meant. 

These days, just being alive qualifies as being okay. The simplest acts — washing my hair, eating a vegetable, stumbling to the coffee maker after another night of bad sleep — are acts of hope. To have even a small promise is to have more than most. But I don’t have to tell you that another safe zone in Gaza was bombed, that children are starving even though there is more than enough food for them hoarded in other parts of the world. I don’t have to tell you that being alive in America is becoming more dangerous by the minute if you are anyone but a wealthy, white, cisgender man. Call it sensitive, call it woke, call it female, call it what you want. There never was, and never will be, justification for taking an innocent human life. But I don’t have to tell you any of this — unless, of course, you’ve stopped listening.

That would not be out of the ordinary in our age of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is the divide that arises within ourselves when our actions don’t align with our values and beliefs. For instance, we can believe that every child deserves food, shelter, and love, and at the same time, avert our eyes from a mother and child begging on our way to the Starbucks drive-thru. We could’ve given up the latte to give them a few dollars, but we had a bad day, and maybe we lost a dream we once had, and don’t we deserve that one, small thing to make us feel better? 

We all experience cognitive dissonance, because we live in a time where we can scroll through Instagram and see a photo of a gravely injured person, followed by an advertisement for a luxury supplement made from factory farm byproducts, followed by a photo of our coworker’s baby announcement. The content we consume desensitizes us to the harsh reality of our world, teaching us that it’s okay to distance ourselves from the truth because we can simply click away.

I often think about how if I considered all the suffering in the world at once; really tried to carry it around and see each person who needed help or love, I would not survive the weight. No one would. In turn, there is an unspoken sentiment that the only way we can really manage all the pain in the world is to not manage it at all. We avoid the news, change the channel, drive by without stopping.

What a privilege it is, to be able to set it all down, to turn our attention back to ourselves, our loved ones, our lives.

The part of me that knows this is wrong is a trait learned directly from my mom, Rita. When I was a kid, she once pulled over in the middle of a blizzard and told my brother, my sister, and me to lift up our feet. Then she got out and opened each of our doors, wet flurries floating into the warm insides of the car, and yanked the floor mats out one by one.

From the window I watched her place a bulky mat behind each of the tires on the stranded car. Then she instructed the driver, a complete stranger, to put the vehicle in reverse while she pushed at the front, her boots slipping in the snow. The car reversed out of the ditch and back onto the road, the old woman inside pleading, “Thank you, thank you!” 

Rita smiled and waved goodbye casually, as if inconveniencing herself to help the stranger was a fact of life, rather than a conscious choice she made. 

Because of her, I grew up with this understanding: to help and care for others is human nature. 

But how do we act upon this, when we know we cannot help everyone? How do we avoid the feeling of cognitive dissonance, when we are aware of human suffering all around us, but we also need to feed the dog and answer stupid emails and make our healthy little breakfasts?

I don’t know if I have an answer. But I do know that the worst thing we can do is look away, then justify our complicity. So, we have to do the arbitrary, monotonous things that help us stay afloat, and we have to take care of ourselves and the people we love. But we must also talk openly about injustices, give back, sign petitions, share knowledge, write opinion pieces, call our representatives, and pull over in the middle of a blizzard. Not because it looks good, or even because it feels good, but because we must.

If caring for others is human nature, then we must also admit that turning away from this impulse, by doing nothing, is a deliberate choice.  

At the Florida apartment complex, late at night, I took the dog out again. The sky was a pool of ink and the smoke from a cigarette curled into my nose. I walked by the couple smoking and a woman, lean and sunned, asked if my mother was on vacation.

I thought of my mom inside on the couch, where she was, watching television. “Yes.” I smiled. “She’s just on vacation.” 

The neighbor ashed her cigarette. “Good, that’s what I thought. She must be on a cruise or somethin’.”

I tried not to laugh at the absurdity of the idea. A cruise—oh the money, the health that would require!

Instead, I said, “Have a good night!”

This was the third time a neighbor inquired after my mom. I walked back to the apartment thinking that maybe I should tell her, if only because she might find comfort in the fact that her neighbors cared. 

“Mom.” I kicked off my sandals and unhooked the dog’s harness. “People keep asking about you, I think they think you’re…dead?”

I regretted saying the word “dead” instantly. There was a pause, the dog’s pitter-patter on the floor, the rush of sea breeze in the palms.

Then my mom clapped a hand against her thigh and let out a big, long laugh. It was a giggle that encompassed both her exasperation at the continued setbacks of her life, and the ridiculous improbability of life itself. I let myself laugh with her.

Which is to say, we remembered our humanness despite our pain.

What if we don’t have to choose between bearing the weight of the world, or avoiding it?

I heard once that love is not just a feeling — love is also a verb. Maybe we can see that when we let ourselves feel the sorrow of others, we are also expanding our capacity for love. Maybe we can bear witness to the greatest suffering, but learn to transmute that pain into action. This is not a cure-all in this awful, burning world. But it is, I think, how we can hold onto our humanity for another day.