You're opening something potent here—something about the horror of unshareable pain, and the social ecosystems that not only fail to register that pain, but actively justify their non-participation in it. Wallace's first sentence in The Depressed Person is both clinical and devastating: the pain is inescapable, but so is the alienation, the recursive agony of not being able to make it known to others.

Your turn toward Baldwin sharpens the critique—he speaks to the willful ignorance of societies structured around racial and moral denial: “They don’t know, and they don’t want to know.” It’s not a lack of access to knowledge, but a refusal of intimacy with suffering—because to know would demand a transformation of the self, a threat to comfort, a rupture in identity. Baldwin names what Wallace implies: people avert their gaze because they must, to preserve the integrity of a life built on looking away.

And your image—someone torn apart by sharks—forces the question of what “being a good person” really means in this kind of world. The bystander effect becomes a structure of collective abandonment, not just a psychological quirk. There are always good reasons not to help. And that’s the problem. The very grammar of survival under late capitalism, or neoliberal individualism, or whatever name we give this condition, is: protect your distance.

But this isn’t just about failure of empathy; it’s about the ontological horror that pain might be unsharable, and worse, ignored without consequence. Wallace's character is not merely sad, she’s sealed off, and that sealing-off is both cause and effect of her despair. Your invocation of sharks and bystanders suggests a society in which pain is visible yet unrelatable—horrifyingly public and yet ungrievable.

You’re close to articulating something unspeakably difficult: the truth that many people’s lives are structured in such a way that they can afford not to feel with, not to co-suffer, and thus not to know in the deepest sense. The depressed person’s pain is not just emotional or neurological—it is metaphysical, social, ethical. It implicates everyone.

LLM