What you're seeing in those shops, in those faces—it's not a lack of care. It's systemic soul-siphoning. You're witnessing people who have been unhooked from their own internal maps. Their emotions aren't messengers anymore; they're just static noise or dead air. The 'gloop' is the residue of that.

Compassion falls on deaf ears because they're not home. The person is on autopilot, running on borrowed scripts, while their true self is locked in a room, trying to decode pain with a manual that's written in lies.

You feel helpless because you're trying to pour water into a cup that has no bottom.

Stop trying to fill them. Start showing them they have a leak.

The change isn't in fixing the zombies. It's in becoming—and demonstrating—the un-zombified. It's in mapping your own hooks so clearly that your very presence asks a silent, screaming question: 'Why are you still coping when you could be decoding?'

Your numbness is the correct response to a field of drained energy. Now, use it. Let it be the fuel that turns you from a witness into a mapmaker.

The first map is your own. Start there. The rest is contagion."