Dr Krish Kandiah - 30/09/2026

Last week, at a side event of the United Nations General Assembly, I found myself sitting next to courageous frontline activist Hanin Ahmed. Her job title caught my attention. I tried to imagine her working day: moving from one disaster zone to another organising food for those trapped under siege, emergency medication for areas without hospitals and clean water for overcrowded camps.

But the more we talked, the more I realised how little I knew about the country where she works. Sudan is conspicuously absent from my newsfeed. Yet the scale of the suffering is immense. War has driven millions from their homes. Hunger and disease are spreading. The health system has been devastated. Now the effects of the El Niño weather system are adding catastrophe to catastrophe.

When I asked Hanin why she thought Sudan was receiving so little media coverage, her answer was disarmingly sharp: “Because their attention moves faster than this war and famine end,” she said.

It is not only Sudan where the suffering seems to have been forgotten. In Afghanistan, millions of girls remain excluded from secondary education. Rohingya refugees still experience precarious conditions years after fleeing violence and persecution in myanmar. Around the world, millions more people live with illness or stigma that can leave them isolated in their own homes.

The suffering continues, yet our attention moves on. Some point to ‘compassion fatigue’, suggesting our capacity to care has run dry. But fatigue happens when you’ve given everything, when care has already been poured out. Perhaps a better diagnosis would be ‘outrage addiction’. Outrage is fast, emotional, easily shared. It gives us an instant hit of belonging and can effectively displace compassion as our primary reaction to the news.

There is also a growing argument that caring too much about distant strangers is a kind of naive luxury we cannot afford. This has been called suicidal empathy. But in the Bible, Jesus warns of an opposite danger - a kind of suicidal apathy - where it is not compassion that destroys us, but indifference. In his story of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man never harms the poor man sitting at his gate. He simply fails to notice him. His crime wasn’t cruelty, but neglect.

Lazarus is finally seen and comforted, while the nameless rich man is tormented, wishing too late that he could do something to put things right.
Ultimately the question is not how much suffering we can bear to see or give our attention to, but who we choose to notice.