It’s strange how easily we mistake beauty for worth. The eye judges long before the heart decides — and that quiet bias shapes how we see one another, and even how we see other living beings. There’s a reason we don’t admire the crow the way we admire the parrot.
Our compassion, when it arrives, is rarely free of preference. We are moved by what we find beautiful and unmoved by what we find unpleasant. It feels acceptable to kill a cockroach because it looks creepy, yet unthinkable to harm a butterfly because it’s pretty. But even the cockroach, unsettling as it seems, plays its part in nature’s intricate design.
Beauty often amplifies compassion, while silence mutes it. We seldom march for fish — not because they don’t suffer, but because we neither hear their cries nor see their tears. We’ve come to believe that sound and sight are measures of worth. A fish may not scream or weep, but it bleeds the same red as we do. When empathy depends on how something looks, we lose sight of what kindness truly means.
Humanity’s vastness is often seen as a burden on this planet — billions of us consuming, producing, and polluting. Yet we rarely think of what our sheer numbers could accomplish if we turned even a fraction of our energy toward compassion.
Change doesn’t begin with grand gestures; it begins quietly — when we stop measuring empathy by appearances. Life is not a hierarchy, with humans on top and the rest below, but a shared continuum of existence. The tree that cools our street, the bird that carries seeds across distances, the bee that sustains our crops, and the humble worm that nourishes the soil — all are part of the same circle that keeps us alive.
A few thoughtful acts may seem small, but multiplied across billions, they become a quiet revolution of empathy. And perhaps, by doing a little for everyone else, we might learn to live a little better with ourselves.
