The Cost of Choosing Comfort Over Humanity

One of the deepest wounds I carry from childhood is this: I said no, and it didn’t matter.

I set boundaries—clearly, visibly, sometimes even desperately—but those around me often chose their comfort, their convenience, their authority, over my wellbeing. I wasn’t heard. I was dismissed, sometimes even ridiculed, for trying to assert myself. And though the pain of those moments passed silently back then, it shaped me. It taught me something brutal: that many people will prioritise their comfort over another person’s pain.

That wound is not just mine. It's collective.

What I lived through on a small scale—being emotionally overridden, ignored, and invalidated—is a reflection of something much bigger and more dangerous: the global tendency to turn away. To look away from suffering because it’s too much. Too complicated. Too uncomfortable.

That’s how entire societies end up silent in the face of genocide.

What’s currently happening in Gaza is unbearable (not just because of the horrifying violence, but because of the staggering silence and justification from people who should know better.) children buried under rubble, entire families wiped out. It's hard to see that people not only say nothing, but explain it away. They tell themselves it's too complex, that both sides are to blame, that it's not their business, etc. These are the stories people use to keep themselves comfortable, to avoid the truth of what’s unfolding. 

But every justification, every silence, is a form of consent. A way of choosing comfort over humanity.

We often ask how atrocities are allowed to happen. The answer is disturbingly simple: they are allowed to happen when people choose comfort over truth, over confrontation, over empathy.

It starts at home. It starts with not listening to a child when they say "no." It starts with dismissing someone’s tears because they’re “too sensitive.” It starts with silencing discomfort, pushing it down, pretending everything is fine—because facing the pain would mean feeling something, and maybe doing something.

And it scales up.

From ignored boundaries to ignored bombings and starvation, it's the same pattern. When we don’t challenge it in our own lives, we become complicit in it globally.

Healing—real healing—asks us to sit with discomfort. To listen. To care even when it's messy, even when it's not convenient. If we can’t even hold space for the pain in our families or communities, how can we be expected to hold space for global suffering?

I don’t have all the answers. I’m still healing, still exhausted, still unwinding a lifetime of internalised avoidance. But I do know this: 

Silence is not neutral. Discomfort is not the enemy. And it matters—deeply—that we begin to choose compassion over comfort, truth over apathy, and courage over silence.

Because lives—real human lives—depend on it.