Stop reading the cruelty cases Deb. Give yourself a break from them before your physiology does it for you and gives you a nervous breakdown. I've found that every several years the stress of being a mere witness to this world ends up shutting me down for a couple of months. When that happens I lose whatever relationships I'd carefully built up and end up spending whatever savings I'd collected just to subsist. I've become so familiar with that cycle that I no longer bother with the niceties now.
I don't know what else to say other than that I can sympathise. I feel the exact same way as you describe and I know that even my very best efforts for the conventional movement amount to little more than a drop in the ocean.
We could perhaps hope that we're living in a projected, holographic computer simulation after all. Perhaps all the pain that all life has experienced is nothing more than a sub-routine in a program that some supercomputer in the macrocosm is executing in its dynamic memory. Perhaps all life is little more than the digital manifestation of a machine's desire to find answers to its own problems and we're all just metaphors of digital bits. Maybe this is the Matrix? Perhaps 10,000 years here in the microcosm is only a nano-second to the machine out there in the macrocosm and the choices we make, whatever species we are, for good or bad, are just the error ratio of the machines conclusions...
That kind of philosophy short circuits my immediate emotional pain. It takes me weird places. A successful action by the OOS might be examined by the machine who decides never to make that same mistake again or decides that this particular program is inefficient. The OOS, for many reasons, could be the best thing we ever do.
Spending time around other species and doing my best to bring them some kind of joy is the only drug I know that makes life tolerable in the mean time.
