Egocentric and human

I'm sometimes wondering (yes, I do that sometimes even though being a mom and a student I don't have loads of time on my hands) how we are able to filter through so much terrible information available non-stop on all kinds of media and maneuver our way in this mass of horror in such a way as to keep being essentially egocentric most of the time. I'm not talking about the old childish 'selfish' thing. This some of us managed to overcome, at least to some degree. I'm talking about the inability to step out of one's little life and be less concerned about our petty endeavors, problems, these mostly not so very dramatic issues (as dramatic as they sometimes feel...). It is not possible for us, little humans, to take the burden of being aware of too much around us, it would crash our processor. We must perceive everything through our own experience, no matter how limited it is. We must obsess about our little world, everyday problems, responsibilities, maybe some reaching a little further into the future and maybe some of them involving somebody else than just us, the ones doing the obsessing.
It's only from time to time, when something really huge hits us, something that cannot be easily ignored that we shake off the state of egocentric little-worldedness for a short while and look around, wide-eyed and shocked... realizing that there is so much happening. There is so much that we would rather not know. Because if we really, truly, and fully 'know' about this we won't be able to find any peace, not even back in our little world of well-known worries. I know it is easy to say things like this and yes, not so easy to fight off the flurry of everyday stuff, smaller and bigger, stuff that sometimes really buries us so deep that we cannot see any light. We do realize sometimes that these worries of ours, at least some of them, are not that big but only when we compare it to what other people have to carry. So often we just stop looking around, get so engrossed in our lives, that we block anything else.
And then we hear a story of a little boy who is abused by his own mother, whose little 5 year old life is full of pain and sadness, and anger, and no love, no safety, no closeness... And then a big earthquake hits some part of our planet. And so many people lose their loved ones, their homes, their whole lives turned into a nightmare in a matter of minutes. The feeling we get then... I don't know, we feel disturbed, uneasy, sick. We feel so sorry for this little boy, for these people struck by the cruel nature. For a moment we forget about our own problems, these thing we need to deal with and so many of which feel like too much, too difficult, so burdensome... But then, we just need to come back. Our instinct of survival tells us to continue with our lives, take care of our problems, stop taking all this other crap so seriously, who can worry about the whole world, right? Donate a few dollars to help the unlucky ones, feel the appropriate amount of pain for the little boy, outrage towards the mother... but we cannot keep the pain, it must subside, we have so much of our own to carry... We can take only so much, don't we?!