“The Burden of Loving Everyone”
In the age of infinite connection, neighbor has become a dangerously elastic term.
The algorithm has made us all adjacent—strangers, zealots, fools, and prophets alike—each a flickering face on the same glass screen. What once required proximity now demands only a scroll. Thus, “love thy neighbor” has mutated from an ethical principle into a test of psychological endurance.
The problem is not that love is impossible, but that the definition of neighbor has expanded faster than the human heart’s capacity to recognize meaning. When everyone is your neighbor, no one truly is. Compassion becomes a diluted currency—spent everywhere, valuable nowhere.
Even the most venerable faiths, once born in villages of dust and closeness, now find themselves preaching universal empathy to a species drowning in digital noise. Can one truly love an avatar? Can faith stretch across a thousand empty profiles?
Perhaps love, to survive, must become selective again—not in hatred, but in focus.
To love everyone equally is to love no one particularly.
Even God, one suspects, filters His feed.