Most of us organise our days around people we can name. Someone needs collecting, a parent needs a call, there is work unfinished and something in the house has stopped working. These obligations are real. So is the danger that, with enough of them, the rest of humanity becomes background.
Sudan Tribune reports that the UN human rights chief said drone strikes killed 306 Sudanese in October. That is an attributed figure, not something independently established here. It deserves attention without our supplying imagined details about the people who died. We do not need to invent their lives to recognise that they had lives beyond the manner of their deaths.
Perhaps one of the quieter failures in our relationship with distant suffering is that people become visible to us only when something terrible happens to them. Even then, they may remain a number. Their ordinary existence never quite enters the picture, although ordinary existence is precisely what we spend so much effort protecting for ourselves.
There is a reasonable objection. Nobody can carry every catastrophe into every day. A person who is struggling to care for their own family does not acquire more time or money because another dreadful report appears. Constant exposure can leave us exhausted and scarcely more useful than before.
But there is room between carrying everything and allowing everything distant to disappear.
We can choose to follow a crisis beyond the first report. We can be more demanding about the information we share, particularly when outrage makes certainty tempting. Where we have the means, we can examine credible routes for assistance and make a considered commitment. None of this gives us control over a war. It does give some direction to the attention we have.
The difficult part is allowing that commitment to survive the return of ordinary distractions. The broken appliance will still need fixing. There is no virtue in neglecting the people beside us. Yet caring for them need not become a complete explanation of what we owe.
A death toll briefly brings strangers into view. Whether they remain visible once the headline has passed is partly our decision.