Love for Humanity

And why I stopped trying to save the world

I am five years old, standing on my tiptoes in our apartment and searching frantically through every drawer.

Where are they?

I drag a wooden chair across the floor, climb onto it, and reach for the top shelf. My fingers brush against the carton. My heart skips. I grab my dad’s cigarette packs, clench them to my chest, and jump down.

A key turns in the front door downstairs. My parents are home. Panic shoots through my chest. I run to the living room, find two big ceramic flowerpots, plunge my bare hands deep into the damp dirt, and bury the cigarettes as fast as I can.

My mom walks into the room. She stops and looks down at me. My hands are black with mud, and dirt is scattered all over the rug. She does not know whether to laugh or shout. She reaches down, pulls the crushed box out of the soil, and looks at me with a stern face.

“Erik, what are you doing with these? You can’t smoke. It’s unhealthy.”

“I know!” I yell, tears burning my eyes. “I’m burying them so Dad can’t smoke them!”

From the moment I have memories, I feel everything at full volume. I am deeply sensitive to the pain around me. I notice the tension in my parents’ voices before they even speak. I watch my dad light a cigarette on the balcony, and my stomach ties into knots. I walk up to him, look into his eyes, and tell him: “I want you to stop. I don’t want you to die.”

He shifts on his feet, looking down at the floor, uncomfortable. “I know, Erik. I’m going to stop soon. I’ve only had three today.”

I love my dad. But right there, at five years old, an instinct takes root inside me: people I love are in danger, they cannot take care of themselves, and it is my job to rescue them.

The Enlightened Savior

I grow up with this sensitivity tuned to the highest frequency. When I see an animal in pain, when I see a homeless person on the street, when I hear about war or famine on the news, it doesn’t just register as information. It feels like an open wound in my chest.

For a long time, I think this sensitivity is my greatest virtue. I tell myself I have a gift for compassion.

What I do not see is how fast that compassion becomes fuel for my ego.

Caring about suffering gives me an identity. Being the one who cares makes me feel noble, strong, and morally awake. I begin seeking out stories of injustice, climate disasters, and victims of cruelty. The worse the story is, the more my savior instinct fires up. Stepping in to help makes me feel powerful. When I speak up for someone who is struggling, I get a rush of confidence. I feel like a hero.

To keep that feeling alive, I put impossible demands on myself. I cannot just be Erik. I have to be the person who fixes things. I have to be the one who cares more than everyone else.

And when you cast yourself as the savior, you immediately turn everyone else into a victim.

I think back to when I am fourteen. I spend hours on my computer after school, chatting in forums and messaging boards. I meet a girl online. She is my age, but her life is chaotic, dark, and full of pain. She tells me about her family fighting, how lonely she feels, how she doesn’t want to live.

Every night, I sit at my desk in the dark, watching the cursor blink on my screen, typing messages of reassurance. I feel like a lifeline. I tell myself that if I log off, something terrible will happen. I am her protector. But I’m not always able to be online. I’m sometimes focused on other things, other people. She doesn’t like that. She feels like I’m abandoning her. I feel guilty, but I also feel like I can’t skip out on my friends or my sleep just to talk to her.

One evening, she sends me a message.

Look what I did for you.

An image loads on my screen. It is a photo of her bare forearm. Fresh, red cuts form letters carved into her skin.

My name is cut into her arm.

I freeze when I see it. She types: Now you will always be with me.

A feeling of pure terror wells up inside. My hands shake. I can barely touch the keyboard. I block her immediately, pretending I didn’t see it. I feel guilty. This is my fault. I caused this. I made her do this.

And in that terrifying shock, an instinct cuts through the panic: This is not help. This is a trap.

My savior role hadn’t saved her. Instead, it fed a bottomless spiral. My rescuing didn’t make her stronger; it made her hurt herself to keep me at the keyboard. I see with sudden, sickening clarity that if I stay and keep playing the hero, both of us will drown.

I message a common friend of ours and explain the situation as best as I can. I’m not able to be her friend anymore. It’s not good for us.

It feels cold to leave her hanging like that. I don’t know if I’m making the right decision. But I know that to keep this chat going would be the wrong decision. This experience teaches me a lesson I will never forget: sometimes helping another person can do the greatest harm. When you let someone make you their savior, you are not healing their pain, you are entering a dangerous pact that makes the both of you sick.

The Revolutionary and the Enemy

I carry that same savior drive straight into politics.

In my late teens and early twenties, I become a radical activist. I throw myself into demonstrations, student politics, and political parties. I stand up in crowded debate halls, grab the microphone, and speak with fierce, uncompromising certainty.

I make crowds cheer. I make opponents turn red with anger. I tell myself I am doing it because I care about the weak. I tell myself that someone has to stand up to injustice, speak the unvarnished truth, and refuse to back down.

A part of me loves the fight.

I love the feeling of being the righteous revolutionary. I love attacking the majority, pointing out their hypocrisy, and feeling like the brave defender of the small.

When I speak to my own political group, I talk to them like friends. I look them in the eye. I see their humanity, their hopes, and their vulnerabilities. They are good, decent people deserving of empathy.

When I talk about the other side, I talk about them as if they are not even in the room. I speak about them as if they are an enemy. They are cruel, selfish, or stupid. I paint them with broad, ugly strokes.

Years pass before I realize what I am actually doing.

I think I am fighting for the small, but all I am doing is deepening the ditch between them and everyone else. Every time I mock or dismiss the opposition, I make society more polarized. I feed the very hostility I claim to fight against.

When I finally realize I can’t call people stupid anymore, I start studying psychology. I realize that I need to try to understand people. But that’s not so easy. Psychology speaks plenty about diagnosis. Everyone can be explained with a label, a personality type, a trait, an attachment style, ADHD or a trauma. I think I’m understanding them better. But I’m understanding a caricature of what they are, not the person underneath. I still don’t get it.

Instead of becoming humble, I simply upgraded my vocabulary. Where I once called my political opponents stupid, I now called them traumatized. I became an unpaid armchair psychologist diagnosing strangers from across the room. Someone would express a tax policy I disliked, and I would nod with faux-spiritual pity and think: Ah, how sad. A classic avoidant defense mechanism rooted in childhood fear.

I tell myself this is compassion. And sometimes, it gives me brief moments of understanding. People say I make them feel understood. While reading up on a certain trauma, I feel like, for a moment, I can empathize with the person, and see where they are coming from. But other times, I use diagnosis as a weapon. A way to organize people into groups, the same way I once organized people into political parties.

Diagnosing someone is just another way to avoid sitting down and looking them in the eye. It is another way to say: I am healthy, clear-headed, and right; you are damaged, confused, and wrong.

True compassion doesn’t look down from a high tower. I want to sit down with people, to be equal to them. I want to learn to listen to why someone sees the world the way they do, without trying to correct them, fix them, or explain them away. So I shake away the habit of trying to come up with a theory or a diagnosis for why the person feels the way that they do, and I try to just pay attention to what they are saying.

Breaking the Superhero

At eighteen, the weight of being the world’s savior finally breaks me.

I am running campaigns against war, organizing for refugee rights, protesting climate destruction, leading student councils, and trying to pass my university classes. My sleep is light and filled with worries and bad dreams. When I wake up tired, I ignore it. When my stomach churns with anxiety, I tell myself: Other people are dying. Other people have it worse. You don’t have the right to be tired.

I carry the guilt of the whole planet on my back. I don’t want to be another white man, another oppressor, someone else with privilege who didn’t use that privilege to make a difference.

Then my body pulls the emergency brake.

I walk into a lecture hall, and the room starts spinning. My chest tightens until I can’t pull air into my lungs. I think I’m having some kind of medical issue. I sit down, shaking uncontrollably, terrified I am having a heart attack.

But it’s just a panic attack.

Within weeks, the anxiety invades my daily life. I start stuttering. When someone asks me a simple question, I don’t know how to answer anymore. The confident, articulate young politician vanishes. Half the time I call in sick. The other half I sit in the corner of rooms, shivering, feeling like a ghost. My colleagues ask me what the hell is going on with me. They’re furious about my unexpected cancellations. They say I’ve let them down.

Christmas arrives. I receive my university grades.

I fail every single class that semester. Every single one.

I sit in my small room, looking at the failing marks on the screen. Before this semester, I thought I was a hero, a bright budding genius, someone strong and capable. Now, I feel like I was always a failure in disguise.

For days, I feel a shame so deep I can barely look at myself in the mirror. But once the shame disappears, I start to feel relief. Life seems to still be spinning. Other people in the party take my place, they even seem to do a better job than I ever did.

The universe does not need me to save it.

The planet is not waiting for me to fix everything. My stuttering and my panic attacks are my body’s way of shouting at me: You are not a god. You are an ordinary, fragile human being.

📚 In When the Body Says No, physician Gabor Maté shows that when we habitually suppress our own limits to appease others, our physiology eventually says the “no” we refused to voice. Listening to bodily exhaustion is often the beginning of real self-respect.

The Trap of Becoming Small

After my burnout, I start to make myself small. My sensitivity had once pushed me into wanting to be a superhero. Now, it makes me feel like a victim, weaker than others and less capable of living a full life.

I start telling myself that I can’t move to the Netherlands, that I don’t have what it takes to start my own business, that I can’t become a teacher. I read books and articles about high sensitivity, and instead of finding insight, I start to feel like I am less than other people because of my sensitivity.

I become hyperfocused on the negative feelings in my body. Any sign of stress, anxiety, or tension becomes a reason to pull back, to withdraw, and to freeze. I often berate myself for feeling this way. When I feel weak or tired, I criticize myself. I wish I didn’t feel anxious or scared, and then I hate myself for having low days.

To cope, I begin treating my emotions like my master. I start to identify with how I feel, as if my feelings define who I am. If a part of me overthinks a friendship or worries about something, I treat that worry as the absolute truth. If a part of me doesn’t want to go to a party, I cancel immediately, even when there are other parts of me that would have enjoyed going.

My comfort zone becomes more and more restrictive. My life fills up with rules of what I can and cannot do. I’m not growing anymore; I am shrinking. In the past, I pushed myself to do things I didn’t like, ignoring my body and crossing boundaries until I crashed. That made my life unpleasant and rigid. Now, I push myself to avoid anything difficult, and that is making my life just as unpleasant and just as rigid.

I thought I was practicing self-care. But using sensitivity as an excuse to hide from life is not compassion; it is just another form of fear.

What It Actually Means to Be Strong

For years, I believed that strength meant never letting anyone see me doubt. When work piled up, when deadlines went sideways, or when self-doubt made me question everything, I tightened my jaw, looked straight ahead, and carried on alone. I thought it was noble to suffer in silence with a stern face. Maybe you have played the stoic martyr too. But if you are drowning, you don’t pretend you are swimming. You admit you are in trouble, you ask for help, and you do what it takes to stay afloat.

Pretending nothing hurts is not strength; it is just stubborn numbness. Real strength means admitting fear, asking for help, and still deciding what to do next.

Feelings are information, not commands. When my stomach tightens or my chest feels heavy, my body is telling me what matters to me and where my limits are. If I ignore that information and clench my teeth, I run myself straight into another burnout. But if I let my fear dictate every choice I make, I trap myself in a tiny room.

Real strength means saying: I feel anxious right now, this is difficult, and I need help. And then taking the next step anyway.

What Helping Actually Means

I still think compassion is one of the most important things there is. Caring for other people, including the ones I will never meet, including the ones living on the other side of the planet, including the times when nobody can see me doing it.

But caring for other people has turned out to be far less straightforward than I once thought.

In the past, I thought that if I saw somebody struggling, the answer was to help them. To step in and do it for them. Now I think the answer is usually to help them learn how to do it themselves.

When I stepped in and took somebody’s problem off their hands, I don’t think I was doing it out of concern for them. I think I did it for myself, and for my own ego. I did it to feel better about myself.

The more you do for somebody who is struggling, the less capable they feel. They start depending on you. They start believing they can’t manage on their own, and because they don’t feel competent, they struggle more. That isn’t what I want for anybody I love.

I think about what kind of father I will be. When I watch my child struggle to write, I shouldn’t step in and write it for him. When he struggles with his homework, that isn’t a reason to do his homework. It is a reason to sit down next to him, to listen to him, to hear him, and to encourage him while he works it out himself, with love and support and care.

I realize then that his struggles are what will make him strong. How he shows up in those tough moments, that helps him build character. It was my discomfort that made me confident. If I tried to protect my son from pain, he would not get the same chance to build his own confidence.

For a long time, I thought that when you feel compassion for somebody, you are supposed to solve their problem. I thought that was what helping meant.

I also thought that if I couldn’t help somebody directly, I was useless. Whenever somebody opened up to me about a problem I couldn’t fix, I felt like a failure. I still wonder where that voice came from.

📚 Grounded in Adlerian psychology, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s The Courage to Be Disliked outlines the “separation of tasks.” Real compassion means relating to others as equals on horizontal ground, rather than looking down to rescue or fix them.

Nothing Makes You More Human Than Failure

Nothing makes me feel more human than failure. Every failure I have experienced in life, from my failure to build a living from my YouTube channel to my failure in politics, has taught me how to be more human. When I struggle, I learn that I am not perfect.

If I had succeeded at every task I took on, I would have quickly grown arrogant and out of touch. When I was at an all-time high of popularity in politics, I felt unstoppable. I walked into schools with a big smile, high on the support I received from the students. When I was on YouTube and passed a hundred thousand monthly views, I felt like I was about to have my big break. When I became more successful as a programmer and started delivering big projects one after the other, I started thinking I was a genius.

It just takes a cold to bring me back down to earth again. Failure teaches me that it is okay to be human. Sometimes, in success, I forget.

After my breakup in Amsterdam, I felt like the biggest loser again. When I went out to hang out with friends and couldn’t brag about how well my relationship was going, I thought they would think I was pathetic. When I was a junior in my field and struggling to make ends meet, I thought people would look at me and see a failure.

Instead, people continued to hang out with me and accept me for who I was. Even if I wasn’t perfect, they still took the time to see me. At first I thought it was pity, and then I realized that they don’t have it all figured out either. You don’t have to be successful to be worthy of love or care.

Once I stopped treating life as a grim rescue mission, I was ready to rediscover something I had abandoned at age five: how to treat my daily work as play.

✦ Love for humanity What, the action: I honor my sensitive side. When someone is in pain, I offer my presence and support instead of unrequested advice or pity. Why, the purpose: I care for the people around me as equals, knowing that people are clumsy, flawed, and doing what they can to get through the day. How, the method: When someone struggles, I give them room to handle it instead of jumping in to take over. When I make a mistake or hit my limit, I allow myself to be human.

Erik Thor, Why I Love

Reflection and Inquiry