Amanda and I don’t own a television. This is hardly a culture crusade; we just don’t watch many shows, and thought it was better to be deliberate about the ones we did watch. It also forces us to be more creative when we have an evening with nothing to do. But not having a television has changed the way I perceive my culture: I implicitly assume that the country watches less TV than they did ten or twenty years ago—for no other reason than because I watch less TV now than I did ten or twenty years ago. But this is in direct contradiction to Nielsen statistics which indicate that Americans watch more television now than ever before.

This is a form of what a psychology textbook would call egocentrism. It means that I interpret the world based on myself first of all. The term is usually used to refer to a developmental stage in infants where the baby thinks that his mother doesn’t exist if he closes his eyes, but I think that in some small capacity we never grow out of it. When our basic needs are met, when we never once in our lives have to wonder where the next meal will come from or where we will stay that night, it’s easy to believe subconsciously that the same is true of everyone. (Even here I assume that this is true of everyone because it’s true of me.)

My own theory is that this is a defense mechanism. In America we are assaulted every day by stories and statistics telling us all the things we need to care about: AIDS, corporate corruption, dirty water, drugs, endangered species, exercise, high fructose corn syrup, poverty, sustainable agriculture, topsoil erosion. It’s too much. It leads to cultural apathy. I can’t possibly fix any of those things, so I can’t allow myself to care. Any time I hear of a new disaster, injustice or social problem, my first filter is, Does it affect me? Does it have an immediate impact on my life, or will its consequences not come to pass until after I’m gone? And this determines whether I think about it constantly for weeks and months or whether I forget about it in a half hour.

The brain is wired to cause us to focus primarily on the problems that are directly in front of us. It has to be this way. If we understood the true extent of human suffering in the rest of the world, we would never be able to buy anything or complain about our circumstances; we would never be able to be happy or content with anything, because life is so hard for other people. Because this knowledge would ruin our lives, we convince ourselves that it’s not real. All of it is relegated to a statistic, a mere fact, and set on a shelf next to all the other things we know are true but not real. This is the only way we could function in life.

But the biggest factor in our chronic unawareness is how far removed we are from all of the suffering. Most of it is in other countries, and the biggest problem America has—poverty—we are very good at hiding. The poor people do not live on the same streets or go to the same stores as the rich people; as the leaves fall from the trees, the homeless communities with their brightly-colored tents are ordered to evacuate the forests near the river; and the projects are always far from a major highway so travelers will never see the worst of it.

You have to go looking for it. It will not come to you. But it’s there.