I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

Injustice Only Stings When It's Personal

Most of us move through the world with a kind of selective attention to suffering. We'll get outraged about a policy or a story we see online, but only if it brushes against something we care about personally or something that reminds us we could be next. A parking ticket feels like a cosmic injustice; an unfair system affecting someone in a different neighborhood barely registers.

There's something almost embarrassing about admitting this, but it's worth sitting with. Our empathy has limits not because we're bad people, but because attention is finite and pain feels most real when it's close to home. The tricky part is that injustice doesn't announce itself only to those directly affected by it. The systems that harm others today might harm us tomorrow, or they might shape the world we leave behind. Bukowski's observation isn't really a condemnation—it's more like holding up a mirror. Once you notice you're doing it, you at least have a choice about whether to look away or to deliberately expand the circle of what bothers you.