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Humanity Is What Makes Us Tick

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at American chapter.

As human beings there are many things that make us feel alive, any external factor can cause even the slightest shift of emotions. It is our nature to have at least a small amount of sensibility in ourselves. Any thing can make us feel something, when we loose a loved one, you cry. When you cheer on your favorite team at a sports game you feel joy, when you listen to your favorite song you dance, when someone laughs you laugh along with them and you get an internal rush when you are close to the person or people you love the most.

But as time goes by, we have proven that we are capable of losing all of this sensibility in ourselves and push it away to make room for evil. Haven’t you noticed that we have become witnesses of horrible things on a daily basis and managed to simply live through them. Some news has become so common that it doesn’t shock us anymore. When did we lose our sense of humanity? And is it possible for us to get it back?

Some may still not understand what is humanity, and why we are losing it. According to the dictionary, humanity is “the quality or state of being human.” It is all of the attributes that make us feel these emotions. Humanity is linked to the feeling you get when you see someone suffer and feel their pain. When you see a dog running around looking for food on the street and you feel sad, that is humanity. Or when you see an article about a child suffering from cancer and automatically feel empty, this is your humanity showing.

We are at a time in which many horrible things are happening all over the world, and many are asking themselves, how could there so many awful people in the world? This is why we are living in a time were many are questioning why the world as a whole seems to have lost its humanity, and its sense of compassion for others. With technology we are open to seeing much more news than ever before, and we have become used to it. We have all seen videos of bullying or of racial prejudice and even videos of domestic violence. When we watch these videos they shock us, but they don’t affect our day in a great way, we just continue living not thinking about the horror we just witnessed. By doing this, it doesn’t mean we don’t care, but we are allowing these actions and situations to continue playing out all around the world because, nobody wants to take the time to do something about it.

When we realize this, we learn we are all slowly losing our humanity, some more than others. Instead of reading the news we prefer to see what celebrities wore to a gala the weekend before. Instead of volunteering we prefer to spend a long amount of time on social media, and no this does not make us bad people, but it does make us indifferent toward what is going on with the world, thus allowing the whole human race to steadily loose its humanity. The reason we feel this indifference is because we believe it can never happen to us, and that is a life that we will never have to experience.

It is a very sensitive subject, but it is not too late, we have to review our decisions and rescue in ourselves our sense of affection and compassion. We need to get out of our heads and stop thinking about ourselves in order to make room for others. We must put our personal interests aside and see what others are going through. It is a slow change, but we as a society are capable of regaining our humanity. It took years for it to slip away, and it will take time to fully gain back as well. In the mean time we just have to think about how beautiful our world would be without prejudice or war.