Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

Lately, in order to help with my mental health, I’ve been avoiding news about the current political situation, and it’s been really helping. I haven’t totally buried my head in the sand; I still get some info from others and the stuff that leaks into my social media (which I’ve also been using less) and stuff like John Oliver, but overall, I haven’t been giving it all much thought, and focusing on my hobbies and the people around me have seriously helped.

But obviously I do feel a bit guilty about it. I see people constantly talking about how everyone needs to help as much as they can, about how apathy and resulting inaction is exactly what people in power want. I guess my dilemma is that question: By choosing to take a break, am I giving them exactly what they want? Part of me knows that I probably can’t help very effectively if my mental health is terrible, but another part of me knows that the world won’t pause with me.

Dear Attention Overload,

I think your question is fundamentally about attention. We usually think of attention as a cognitive resource, but it’s an ethical resource, too. In fact, you could say it’s the prerequisite for all ethical action.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil wrote. She argued that it’s only by deeply paying attention to others that we can develop the capacity to understand what it’s really like to be them. That allows us to feel compassion, and compassion drives us to action.

Truly paying attention is incredibly hard, Weil says, because it requires you to see a suffering person not just as “a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.” In other words, you don’t get “the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself” — you have to recognize that you’re a vulnerable creature, too, and tragedy could befall you just as easily as it’s befallen the suffering person in front of you.

So, when you “pay attention,” you really are paying something. You pay with your own sense of invulnerability. Engaging this way costs you dearly — that’s why it’s the “purest form of generosity.”

Doing this is hard enough even in the best of circumstances. But nowadays, we live in an era when our capacity for attention is under attack.

Modern technology has given us a glut of information, constantly streaming in from all over the world. There’s too much to pay attention to, so we live in an exhausted state of information overload. That’s even truer at a time when........

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