I like the idea of coming up with some kind of practice to retrain yourself to be more altruistic. There should be some version of that idea that works, and maybe exposing yourself to stories / imagery / etc. about people / animals who can be helped would be part of that.
One possibility is that such images could become naturally compelling for people (and thus would tend to be addictive or obsession-producing, because of their awful compellingness) -- for such people, this practice is probably bad, sometimes (often?) a net bad. But for other people, the images would lose their natural compellingness, and would have to be consumed deliberately.
In our culture we don’t train ourselves to deliberately meditate on things, so it feels “culturally unrealistic”, like something you can’t expect of yourself and the people around you. (Or perhaps some subtle interplay of environmental influences on how we develop as “processors of reality” when we’re growing up is to blame.) I feel like that part of me is more or less irrevocably closed over (maybe not an accurate sentiment, but a strong one). But in other cultures (not so much in the contemporary West), deliberate meditation was / is a thing. For instance people used to (maybe still do) meditate on the death of Jesus to motivate their love of God.
I like the idea of coming up with some kind of practice to retrain yourself to be more altruistic. There should be some version of that idea that works, and maybe exposing yourself to stories / imagery / etc. about people / animals who can be helped would be part of that.
One possibility is that such images could become naturally compelling for people (and thus would tend to be addictive or obsession-producing, because of their awful compellingness) -- for such people, this practice is probably bad, sometimes (often?) a net bad. But for other people, the images would lose their natural compellingness, and would have to be consumed deliberately.
In our culture we don’t train ourselves to deliberately meditate on things, so it feels “culturally unrealistic”, like something you can’t expect of yourself and the people around you. (Or perhaps some subtle interplay of environmental influences on how we develop as “processors of reality” when we’re growing up is to blame.) I feel like that part of me is more or less irrevocably closed over (maybe not an accurate sentiment, but a strong one). But in other cultures (not so much in the contemporary West), deliberate meditation was / is a thing. For instance people used to (maybe still do) meditate on the death of Jesus to motivate their love of God.
OK, this person on the EA subreddit uses a kind of meditation to reduce irrational/ineffective guilt.