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> For a person with normal levels of empathy, it is significantly harder to feel empathetic pain past this point, and see the once and (possibly) future human within what is often no more than a fully dehumanized heap on the sidewalk.

> If you feel compassion in the abstract, you can only act out of sympathy, not empathy. Feeling what, if anything, it is like to be them slips beyond your reach.

> Reality itself is progressively hacking into their psyches, collapsing their OODA loops from within. No particular identified malevolent actor is responsible — the rest of us are all complicit to varying degrees in the system that allows this process of disintegration to unfold

> Panhandling, strangely enough, is not as common as you might expect. To engage pedestrians and ask for money or food, let alone copywriting sympathy-evoking signs that work, requires a self that is held together and inhabited at a certain minimum viable level of personhood.

> Some seem to be in the kind of chronic dissociated state that leads them to react with alarm and fright to even the kindest, most careful, overtures. They have gone too long being invisible. They are not used to being seen at all.

> Disgust is, of course, the most important emotion to learn to manage and regulate, in learning to bear witness compassionately. Denying that you feel a degree of disgust at all is perhaps worse than letting it uncritically shape your entire response.

> at some point along the path of degradation, the quality of the disgust response changes. ... The emotional response begins to resemble the kind of disgust you might feel at seeing an overturned trash can, with the contents spilled out all over.

> ... the point where you stop seeing a person, and start seeing a thing. ... Even for the most compassionate, a person to be healed turns into a broken object to be repaired at some point.

> If a person is not present enough to maintain perhaps the most basic condition of livability — don’t shit where you eat — it is unreasonable to expect them to do anything else at all, either for themselves, or for others.

> Like a balding man choosing a combover to a decent haircut, the American response to homelessness is rooted in denial of the very possibility of true slums in this greatest of nations.

> The across-the-board denialism results in a perverse search for pathologizing diagnoses and interventions that are framed in terms of blight and disease that must be aggressively stamped out, regardless of the human cost.

> In America, it is politically easier to let humans suffer dehumanizing degradation, than to let them reach for economic and social agency in ways that don’t conform to the aesthetics and optics of middle-class respectability.

> Growing up in India, strangely enough, I was used to seeing more homelessness in less degraded conditions. ... Not much is done by anybody to help, but there is also not much by way of perverse interventionism that prevents the homeless from helping themselves.

> In what ways are we, perhaps, “not there,” despite being physically present within a trail of garbage leading from some equivalent of an overturned trash can to a mess of stuff that pass for “possessions?

> As a more complex example, to be jobless in a milieu that expects you to be employed is like being homeless in some ways. People interact awkwardly with you, and tiptoe around your sensitivities in particular conversations.

> in milieus where having a job is not a necessity for everybody, such as [housewife] it is possible to be “unemployed” but not have to suffer any associated metaphoric homelessness. There is a way for you to be present, visible, and seen, even when the [convo] turns to jobs.

> ... as psychologically debilitating as literal homelessness — online homelessness. Even a quick glance at any notoriously sad place online, such as the YouTube comments section, will reveal the existence of an entire invisible online world that is comparable to homelessness.

> A new platform or medium comes along. You make a first-pass judgment about whether to even join it, based largely on whether you think you can cohere an inhabitable persona on it, and whether you have the time to participate on it.

> If you decide to give it a shot, you go on, you try a few experimental personas on for size, and as one starts to gel, you become present on the platform. There is now something it is like to be you on Platform X.

> They are Very Online, liking, retweeting, beefing, trolling, and reply-guying. But their profiles are incoherent. Their tweet streams reveal a sort of frustrated search for an “at home” presence that seems to forever elude them.

> Their reply conversations have a quality of tentative, inept, entryist behavior being managed from a wrong sort of adjacent identity to the one they are trying to cohere. There are clear patterns of avoidance around them. Often, they appear to be talking to themselves.

> Yet they persist, trying to come alive. Some are so borderline not-human, at-home people have to do a double take or even run tests to check whether they are talking to Russian bot accounts or real people.

> What Twitter reveals is that being at home is largely about seeing and being seen in ways that allow an inhabitable identity gestalt to emerge for you. There should be something it is like to “be on Twitter,” a consciousness you can inhabit.

> As YouTube comments section reveal, it is far too fragmented a space for healthy people to meaningfully inhabit in any persistent way. If you literally try to make an online home on YouTube, there is something wrong with you.

> On YouTube, there are no clear ways to form communities, develop neighborly relationships and friendships, and so on. Sociologically, it is like a business district in a bad part of town.

> As a result, the YouTube audience is largely a digitally homeless one. Lonely, disconnected, and vulnerable to being drawn into ridiculously psychotic bunny trails that can swallow susceptible psyches whole, and spit them out utterly distorted at the other end.