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Originally Posted by Rob Instigator
I cannot watch such things anymore either. As we age I think our ability to handle traumatic imagery becomes less catharsis and more disturbing.
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I like the particular way you phrased this. Catharsis is definitely for the young, when you're younger you develop a sense of outrage at the shocking and it must be emptied for the sake of sanity. Anger is a gift, but it can be consuming. As you get older, the experiences of life make empathy more impacting, you truly feel thing like pain, suffering, and death, based on your own perspective of these experiences in your own life. So when you relive these experiences through story-telling of others pains, you don't empty your anger, you just get overwhelmed by your own pains and have a deeper empathy with the pain of others. When I used to see documentaries about war for example, and they show a scene of a bombing, instead of thinking about the logistics, technology, politics, morality, ethics of the situation, all I can see now is the pain of those being bombed, the grief of their loss, and the horror of that reality. It pains me too much to see it now, so I don't watch. Schindler's List was important, glad I watched it when I was young, couldn't touch that shit now. 12 Years a Slave, I feel is even worse! Its not that slavery was necessarily worse than the Holocaust, but it was in the sense that the Holocaust lasted roughly 20 years, slavery in the Americas for over 250 continuous years. That is A LOT of pain.