Empathy in a Connected World

Thanks to NASA for the Cover Image, @NASA on Unsplash

I opened Twitter up yesterday to see Uighur Muslims in concentration camps, my home state on fire, and fellow Americans needing to take to the streets to fight just for the opportunity to be seen as equal.

Also, there’s a pandemic going on. Did I mention that?

All of this is constantly thrown at us, day after day, every time we open our apps, re-launch Instagram right after closing Twitter, every time I pick up my phone. These stories of people losing their homes and loved ones are interspaced between my friends complaining about class, Stephen A Smith ranting about Lebron James, and memes about the Dallas Cowboys. And they makes me guilty…but not for the reason it should.

The reason I feel guilty when I see these injustices and tragedies is not that I feel compelled to do something, (which I should) or not because I am complicit with the problem (which I am in some cases) but because I don’t feel anything. Compassion has become the hardest feeling to elicit on the internet, simply because there is too much. Too many tweets, too many status updates, videos, photos, podcasts, and articles. All competing for your attention.

So when I see a post about donating to victims of forest fires, I scroll past. Its deadening, I hate it, and I want to change it.

But first, why do we feel this way?

I found that two cognitive tendencies are the reasons our compassion shuts off after too much internet. The first is an umbrella term that a Nature.com study coined called psychic numbing. Psychic numbing describes how we look at multiple victims in a tragedy, and the study found that when the number of identifiable victims increases, our capacity and willingness to help “reliably” decreases.

A boy stuck in a well down the street induces more sympathy than thousands dying in a foreign war. A dog stuck in a tree outside your house will receive more of a response than thousands of dogs being abused all across the country. The dog in the tree receives more sympathy, not because it is a better-looking dog or maybe does cooler tricks, but because a single, identifiable object is a lot easier to relate to than an abstract number. The more you relate, the more you can empathize, as that same thing could happen to your dog or your son.

Stalin, a man responsible for more death and injustice than any other, knew a little bit about this principle when he said, “A single death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic.”

We know that an increase in victims leads to lower empathy, but this is only half of the problem. The other half is that we only have so much to give. Empathy is zero-sum, meaning eventually we run out of it and need to recharge our batteries before we can give again.

The first homeless person I see on the street, I’m likely to give them a dollar. On the 16th, I’m probably going to keep my eyes ahead of me.

Similarly, if your friend just broke up with a long-term significant other and is crying into their ice cream, you probably are going to be pretty sympathetic. If they are still crying five hours and three bowls of mint chocolate chip later, less so. It is not that you care any less, you just don’t have anything to give anymore. 

So not only do the millions of problems the internet exposes us to exhausts our ability to empathize, we only have so much to give. Going back to the original question, though, what can we do about it?

I will be the first to admit I'm no expert, but I think one needs to take care of themselves first before dealing with the internet.

If that means limiting social media, meditating, or even completely ignoring the news, I would encourage you to do whatever works for you.

Yes, there are a lot of problems out there, but none of that is going to matter the noise of it all paralyzes us. After all, empathy is only empathy if it inspires action. Without action, its only stress.

Take care of yourself first, and then let's go to work.