Ed Yong on Breaking Down and Putting Yourself Back Together
My favorite presentation at XOXO this year was Ed Yong’s talk about the pandemic, journalism, his work over the past four years, and the personal toll that all those things took on him. I just watched the entire thing again, riveted the whole time.
Hearing how thoughtfully & compassionately he approached his work during the pandemic was really inspirational: “My pillars are empathy, curiosity, and kindness — and much else flows from that.” And his defense of journalism, especially journalism as “a caretaking profession”:
For people who feel lost and alone, we get to say through our work: you are not. For people who feel like society has abandoned them and their lives do not matter, we get to say: actually, they fucking do. We are one of the only professions that can do that through our work and that can do that at scale — a scale commensurate with many of the crises that we face.
Then, it was hard to hear about how his work “completely broke” him. To say that Yong’s experience mirrored my own is, according to the mild PTSD I’m experiencing as I consider everything he related in that video, an understatement. We covered the pandemic in different ways, but like Yong, I was completely consumed by it. I read hundreds(/thousands?) of stories, papers, and posts a week for more than a year, wrote hundreds of posts, and posted hundreds of links, trying to make sense of what was happening so that, hopefully, I could help others do the same. The sense of purpose and duty I felt to my readers — and to reality — was intense, to the point of overwhelm.
Like Yong, I eventually had to step back, taking a seven-month sabbatical in 2022. I didn’t talk about the pandemic at all in that post, but in retrospect, it was the catalyst for my break. Unlike Yong, I am back at it: hopefully more aware of my limits, running like it’s an ultramarathon rather than a sprint, trying to keep my empathy for others in the right frame so I can share their stories effectively without losing myself.1
I didn’t get a chance to meet Yong in person at XOXO, so: Ed, thank you so much for all of your marvelous work and amazing talk and for setting an example of how to do compassionate, important work without compromising your values. (And I love seeing your bird photos pop up on Bluesky.)
- I hope that makes sense? Sometimes you can feel the pain of others so intensely that it renders you useless to help them or to keep yourself afloat. So you’re still empathetic and open to the experiences of others, but in a much more functional and constructive way.↩
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In my life there have been several instances where landing in a downward spiral and deep depression could have happened. And maybe it did, in hindsight.
But what really did me in was and still is the human catastrophe in the Middle East. I feel so sad about the fate of especially the children suffering from a fight that is way above their heads. And there is almost nothing I can do, apart from donating to War Child, the UNCHR and such…
Yesterday a news item on tv brought it really home: a dead baby in the arms of her big brother, whose anguish was beyond words. I sat there on my comfy couch in my comfy home in a country that hasn’t known war for almost 80 years, and cried like I haven’t done since my wonderful girlfriend died twelve years ago. It broke my heart.
I guess every person has their trigger where they can go to pieces. It is good to have an opportunity to talk about it. And hear others doing that.
Thank you for this, Jason.
I know the words sympathy and empathy have different meanings for different people, but i really like to think of empathy as the ability to understand the feelings of others, and sympathy the ability to live them. With that definition, I would say that what you describe is what happens when you are overwhelmed by sympathy. Whereas you cannot really have “too much” empathy, which you clearly have plenty of, and it gives you that power to communicate effectively and impact people meaningfully, when sympathy is kept in check. Ironically, I suppose with that definition, I am in fact trying to use empathy to understand what happened to you 😜.
Jason. You did similar work as Yong during the pandemic, with the same pillars, I would argue. I followed you every day and found the quality of information and the accuracy of information to be something I considered greatly helpful to get me through all that.
So thank you again. So glad you took some time for yourself. Yong's description of what happened to him, and how he eventually came to reconcile is warning/encouragement for us to all take good care of ourselves, and to build our communities. Thanks for all you do.
Jason - you mentioned being consumed by your pandemic research and coverage. Did you find any parallels to when you covered 9/11? (That's how I initially found you.)
Not really? I was younger and a bit more resilient. And I didn't cover 9/11 as long or as intensely. I also think that I have become more empathetic in my writing & curating over the past 6-8 years (instead of cool & dispassionate & "neutral") and while that's made the site better (IMO), it's been tougher to do it that way, at least for me.
In your footnote, you ask “does that make sense?” about the need to put emotional space around yourself in order to do the maximum good.
It doesn’t just make sense to me, it’s something I have actively been taught in my training as a physician. All physicians deal with this need for compartmentalization in order to keep going at some point in their career. There are many opinions on how to do so effectively without going too far in the other direction.
I don’t particularly have answers. But I’ve noticed that I can deal with terrible situations that happen for horrible reasons or none at all so long as I know we are doing everything we can to the best of our knowledge and ability to help.
The past two weeks I’ve been rotating through the pediatric emergency department at the hospital where I’ve been for my residency. It’s a good illustration of how I do some of this balancing act. Part of our role as residents is to take calls from pediatricians who are sending in their patients, so that there will be a message from that physician already in the chart to explain their reasons for sending them in. As the resident taking the calls, there can be a temptation to try to take all the difficult cases once they arrive; you’ve heard the story, and you’ve probably already started thinking about what should be done. But at a high volume place like ours, that can lead quickly to burnout. It’s better to recognize that you’re just one person, and that there are other doctors who can also take care of the patients.
Are there enough doctors to treat every patient that exists? Of course not, just as there are not enough people doing the work of stopping climate change, nor were there enough people doing the work of stopping the pandemic. But making that space for the humility of knowing that you can’t treat all of the patients, that you must apply limits to your practice, is a crucial part of continuing to be able to practice at all.
It applies to all uphill battles to do good.
Thank you so much for sharing your perspective. ❤️
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