Simone Weil made a strange claim in her notebooks: that the highest form of generosity is not giving what you have, but giving your attention — and that most of what we call 'helping' is actually a performance staged for our own comfort. She meant that when someone is suffering, we instinctively rush to interpret, fix, or reassure, because sitting with another person's reality without reshaping it is almost unbearable. The contemporary psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk documented something structurally similar: that people in distress are most helped not by advice but by being accurately witnessed — by someone who can tolerate the weight of their experience without flinching or reframing it. Together, Weil and van der Kolk point at something practical and demanding: the impulse to offer solutions is often an escape from the harder act of simply bearing witness. The next time someone brings you a problem, notice how quickly you move toward fixing. That speed is a signal about your own discomfort, not their need.

Think of the last time someone came to you with a problem. What were you trying to resolve — their situation, or your own unease?

Drawing from Existentialist Ethics / Trauma Psychology — Simone Weil / Bessel van der Kolk