Empathy in the Age of Apathy – Reclaiming Our Ability to Care

8 min read

When was the last time you came across a tragic piece of media while scrolling through your morning social media feed with that hot cup of coffee? I am certain that you wouldn’t need to think too hard about that question. Studies and observations indicate an overwhelming presence of negative undertones in media content. Social media users are 1.91 times more likely to share negative news articles compared to positive ones.

For decades, corporations and media houses have been exploiting our psychological tendencies to focus our attention on negative and sensationalist news, and why wouldn’t they? Should they not maximize their stakeholders’ wealth by whatever means necessary? After all, it is those KPIs- clicks, shares, bounce rate- that decide whether we have biryani or plain rice for dinner. We not only have to make sure that we succeed, but it would also be nice to see others fail as well.

Our worth in society is determined by where we are in the rat race, but even in winning, we are still rats. But its not that simple, is it? We know how complex our emotions are, our trials and tribulations, and our need to secure a place in society; after all, self-preservation is the primal need of all humans.

But, why is it that we constantly look at everyone in binary while wanting them to look at us for the complex selves that we are? While stuck in a traffic jam, what is it that separates us from the ones outside the window? Are we more humans because we have acquired more wealth? Do their bodies work differently from ours? Do the lives of some humans hold less value than our pets? Or are we still primates pretending to be in personal touch with the gods and hence free to decide who and what gets to be important? The inventions that were supposed to bring us together have pushed us into an age of Apathy where we have become desensitized to the suffering of millions in unimaginable poverty and pain.

How did we reach here?

Humans have historically been the best storytellers known to, well, humans. We tell stories about everything we come across. We want to feel special and have a sense of purpose that is crucial for us to think beyond our self-preservation, which eventually leads to societal progress. Our capacity to feel and understand complex emotions gives rise to a unique sense of empathy that has enabled us to appreciate differences, work together, celebrate festivals, share joy, and connect on such a level that to summarise the sheer scale of emotions and behavior, we came up with the term “Humanity”.

It is this Humanity that stands at the crossroads today. While our brains continue to evolve naturally, our technology has vastly outpaced our capacity to keep up. Within the lifetime of a single human, we have gone from having computers the size of rooms to AI and Quantum Computing. A single trans-Atlantic phone call would be considered an engineering marvel 75 years ago. Today, we find it extremely inconvenient to have a minor lag on our Zoom call across continents separated by a 12-hour time difference. We have become accustomed to now expecting the “next big thing”. With the advent of Social Media, our society has altered significantly in such a small timespan that we are yet to even start reflecting on its implications.

To quote Jurassic Park, “We were so occupied with thinking if we could, we never stopped to question if we even should”.

Social Media was supposed to connect us and bring us together. It succeeded in the former but miserably failed in the other. It became the very medium of exploitation and force-fed consumerism, and our smartphone addiction is now scientifically proven to be on par with the consumption of drugs. The apps are designed to keep us hooked by hijacking our neural networks and creating a perfect profit-churning ecosystem where we, the product, continue to remain distracted and satiated by the infinite scroll of doom. To exacerbate the problem, we are constantly bombarded with advertisements that feed on our insecurities, FOMO, and desires that contribute to mental clutter and discontent. We are now in a state of perpetual online presence, where our workplace and personal life blend into an unpalatable melange. A late-night email from your boss could derail your peaceful evening, sending you into a maelstrom of anxiety.

Stepping outside your home offers no reprieve either. Indian cities, choked by poor planning and corruption, are an assault on the senses. Incessant honking of the motley traffic orchestra, beautiful heaps of trash greeting you every corner, an occasional breakout of a good old “Kalesh” in the middle of a busy street while the onlookers rush to capture the best footage to meet their daily engagement quota on social media, a constant fight for more oxygen in the crammed buses that will not be upgraded till the buses come alive and drop dead just to prove their point; it is overwhelming and exhausting to even give a thought about anyone thats not you or your immediate family.

What can we do about it?

Well, in this age of information, we need to start acknowledging that we don’t know much. This seems like a complete paradox, but one that may help us reclaim our empathy. We need to look at others with the same complexity that we attach to our actions and motives. At the core of it, we want to be seen as “good”. When we end up engaging in behavior that may not be seen as per the idea of “good”, we face cognitive dissonance. To be rid of this dissonance, we come up with a rationale to justify our actions, to allow us to keep engaging in that behavior with less guilt.

We constantly try to forgive ourselves for things that we moral police and berate others for, especially in the modern warfare of the Knights of the Keyboard. It is easy to prepare a marketing strategy to mould a situation involving mass human suffering to sell more of our product through fabricated empathy. It is difficult to be empathetic.

Unless we begin to question and be less sure of our humanity, we cannot begin to care or even think about people who may need some humanity just because they were dealt a poor hand at birth. We need to understand that, in life, it’s not just our hard work but being at the right place, right time, with the right connections (also called luck) that determine our standing in society. If much of our life is heavily dictated by dumb luck, should we not be more kind to people who were crossed by luck? Would we not want people to show humanity if ever we were to be struck by tragedy and left to fend for ourselves? Are we becoming less human ourselves in our pursuit to achieve artificial intelligence?

We can keep the questions rolling, most of them are rhetorical anyhow. I am not seeking an answer, I merely ask the readers to doubt what they have never thought about. Now, whether this helps us actually be more empathetic or we continue onwards with our hubris, the answer remains the same; I don’t know.