Weltschmerz

At nineteen, Lukas gave up meat, flying, and his father.

The first two stuck. The third took about four years and a great deal of shouting and was, everyone agrees now, the least justified of the three.

His father had said, at a dinner, that the world had always been like this and that Lukas would understand when he was older — which is the single most incendiary sentence available to a parent, and which was also, Lukas concedes at thirty-six, roughly true.

---

The feeling had arrived at about sixteen and had not been about anything.

That is the part his mother never understood. She kept looking for the incident. Had something happened at school. Was it a girl.

Nothing had happened. He had simply, at sixteen, in a perfectly ordinary German town, in a house with a garden, become aware of the gap.

On one side: the world as it plainly could be. Not a fantasy — nothing exotic. Just people not being cruel to each other for no reason. Food where there was hunger, given the trucks existed. An arrangement that did not require somebody at the bottom.

On the other side: the world, doing what it does, at scale, on the news, every day.

And the gap between those two was not an intellectual observation. It was a physical weight, low in the chest, that did not go away when he stopped reading.

---

He was insufferable for about six years and he knows it.

The vegetarianism came with a lecture. The flying came with a lecture. He made his sister cry at a Christmas in 2011 about her holiday. He had a period of about eighteen months of correcting people at parties which he now cannot think about without putting his hand over his eyes.

The insufferability, he understands now, was not the feeling. It was a treatment for the feeling — because if the world is unbearable and you are the only one who has noticed, then at least you are doing something, and the doing something is being right at people.

---

The burnout came at twenty-eight, after four years at the NGO.

Not dramatic. He simply stopped being able to open the emails. He would sit in front of a screen full of things that were genuinely happening to genuinely real people and feel absolutely nothing at all, which frightened him more than the weight ever had.

His therapist asked him what he thought would happen if he cared less.

"People die," said Lukas.

"Do they die less when you care more?"

He was angry about that for three weeks and then it did something.

---

Here is where he has arrived, and he offers it to the twenty-year-olds who come through the office now with exactly the same face he had.

The feeling is not a mistake. That was the thing he most needed to hear at nineteen and nobody said. He was not being naive or hysterical or young. He had accurately perceived a real gap and had responded proportionately, and the people around him who did not seem to feel it were not wiser — most of them had simply stopped looking, which is a solution but not a better one.

But the feeling is not an instruction, either. It does not tell you what to do. It has no plan in it. Left alone it will burn through you at whatever rate you allow, and produce nothing but a very tired thirty-year-old who has stopped being able to open emails.

So the work is to convert it. Downward and outward, into something with edges. A caseload. A street. Forty families rather than the world.

That conversion feels, at nineteen, like a betrayal. It feels like agreeing to care about less.

It is the opposite. It is the only arrangement in which the caring survives past thirty.

---

His father died in 2021 and they had made it up by then, mostly, in the specific way of two men who never mention the thing.

Near the end, Lukas said, "You were wrong, you know. About the world always being like this."

"Was I?"

"It has always been like this. But that's not an argument for anything."

His father thought about it for a while.

"No," he agreed. "I suppose it isn't."

That was as close as either of them got, and Lukas has decided it was enough, and mostly believes it.