I’m curious how old you were when Covid hit? I noticed a similar change somewhere in my early to mid 20s.

Seconding both of those - getting older and having kids both have independently made me more responsive to emotional scenes.

And Bluey and all the Pixar films are good!

Probably due to how I grew up, I don’t often feel like it’s… right? Reasonable? for me to cry for personal things. But I can cry for others, for whatever reason. Showed my kids Pixar’s Up for the first time the other day, and we got to the scene near the end where Carl finds some of the messages his wife left him. My kids are still fairly young, and were trying to figure out what was going on in that scene. They also didn’t understand at first why my voice sounded so weird…

I feel like there’s a term for it, but I can’t recall it now - it seems like after you have kids, emotional impacts in media can also start to hit a lot harder. I’m not sure if there’s some empathetic response that tends to get strengthened or what, but my wife and I both have things we either can’t watch anymore or don’t process the same way. Like, I decided to start rewatching Star Trek: DS9 a few years ago (a year or two into fatherhood) and got wrecked by the scenes in the first episode where the captain relives losing his wife.

I think a lot of resistance to this is most people want their kids to be comfortable, and it’s a lot harder to make sure that everyone is comfortable than just making sure what you have can be transformed into keeping your kids in a good spot.

None of that means there shouldn’t be an equal process, just that there isn’t one at present. I think you both are completely correct, the challenge is how do we reach a society that can hold someone accountable, no matter what their wealth level? Alternatively, how do we prevent someone from becoming so wealthy they suborn society?

I think relative harm factors in too. Decimating someone’s resources when they’re likely to struggle to feed themselves next month? Or course that’s reprehensible. Taking a tiny portion from someone who won’t even notice, especially when you’ll probably get a lot more out of it? Now you’re practically Robin Hood