The Life-Changing Power of Last Week's News
How to Reclaim Your Empathy
Empathy is out, apathy is in. We are overconsuming news via technology, and it’s hurting our ability to care about other human beings in an appropriate way.
In her landmark 2011 paper, Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis, Sara Konrath charts the decline of empathy in young people from the late 70s to the late 2010s, and gives us some beautifully phrased reasons why it is happening:
“We speculate that one likely contributor to declining empathy is the rising prominence of personal technology and media use in everyday life. Alternatively, the ease and speed of such technology may lead people to become more readily frustrated or bored when things do not go as planned (e.g., O’Brien, Anastasio, & Bushman, 2010), resulting in less empathic interactions. Furthermore, people simply might not have time to reach out to others and express empathy in a world filled with rampant technology revolving around personal needs and self-expression.”
Let’s focus on the last nine words, “rampant technology revolving around personal needs and self-expression.”
I think we know this instinctually, but it bears reminding. We carry/use our devices and spend time interacting digitally for ourselves. Our insistence on “being informed” by reading and sharing news across social media is something we do for our own egos, and it’s killing our ability to empathize.
The 24-hour news cycle has replaced empathy with apathy. We feel powerless against the rush of bad news and anxiety-causing information that we experience every day.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d theorize that they’ve got us right where they want us. (I picture a monocle-wearing robber baron rubbing his hands together and saying “yeees, it’s all hopeless, so no need to try to change anything, sit down on the sofa and binge TV forever! MWAHAHAHAHA”).
The news has been even sillier since the beginning of the pandemic, testing the boundaries of how many times they can re-phrase “there’s still a virus, it’s still unsafe, the governments of the world are still incompetent, the vaccine is still not being distributed logically, whose fault is it today?”
My friends, most of the news we see every day does not help us in our quest to be better people. There’s a simple reason for this: overload. We confuse “staying informed” with “needing to fill our minds with human suffering 24/7.” We sacrifice our mental health and creativity to stay on top of stories that will develop with or without our involvement. Staying informed is driving us to apathy, and apathy helps no one.
Apathy is Hurting Our Empathy
We are experiencing “empathy fatigue” as a society. This is when we get so used to the breadth of bad news that we subconsciously suppress our own empathy because news shows us all the bad, all the time.
What concerns me most about this is that Viktor Frankl described something very similar in Man’s Search for Meaning, when he talked about life in a concentration camp.
“Apathy… was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow. It was typical to hear the prisoners, while they were being herded back to camp from their worksites in the evening, sigh with relief and say, “Well, another day is over.”
This is an extreme example, and we are obviously not suffering like the Jewish people suffered in the horror of concentration camps. However, the psychology is similar. Overexposure to violence without a clear sense that we can do something about it leads us to feel apathetic. In their quest to keep us reading and watching, the news overexposes us to violence.
I know how hard it is to look at the news and feel apathetic. It makes us feel broken.
Here are three things we can do to fight back.
Get The News Off of Your Phone
Whenever I get a new phone, the very first thing I do after I set it up is find out how to turn off the news feed. That is a distraction you do not need if you’re trying to be a helpful human being. Giving bad news the power to interrupt you at any time of day is a horrible thing to do to your mental health. Turn it off, and unfollow all news accounts on social media.
30 years ago, it would have been impossible to read about the general blind incompetence of politicians at all times of the day. You’d have a newspaper in the morning, then cable news at night.
Just because you can have the hot sludge of bad news piped into your head at all times now does not mean that you are required to. We’ve been living through the same human conflicts for thousands of years, but the news packages them like they’re new, and demands our fresh outrage each time.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It does not make you a bad person to step away from the cutting edge. Trust me, you will not miss out. If there is a disaster that requires your attention, someone in your life will tell you.
Give Yourself The Gift of Last Week’s News
This is the most powerful method when you’re first starting out. Now that you’ve turned off your newsfeed, be more intentional about your news. Subscribe to a daily email like NPR’s daily newsletter or The Skimm. If you prefer audio, try Axios Today, or NPR’s Up First.
You’re going to receive these every morning. Here is the key: do not read/listen to them the day that you get them. Batch them all for the weekend. You’ll be amazed as you go through how many of the issues solved themselves without your knowing about them. They don’t carry the same urgency when you’re a few days behind. Take note of this, because it helps you with the final step.
Specialize
Let me tell you something that you probably already know: you cannot wrap your mind around the scope of all human suffering in real time. No one can. This does not make you a bad person. It makes you a human being, with finite amounts of brainpower that can be directed towards anything.
We seem to be terrified of this truth, thinking that if we don’t try to care about everything, we are somehow negligent. I call B.S. Imagine if we all fought for the issues we were passionate about, instead of trying to care about every evil! What a world we could build.
Specialize. Let yourself start with three issues that matter to you, and expand out from there. I’ll tell you where I started:
Racial equity, especially in education
I consider these to be my “core” issues that align with my values and that I am therefore most passionate about. Rather than consuming general news, I follow nonprofits on social media and through email lists that are on the front lines with these particular crises. They send me the news that is most prevalent to these issues and show me where I can direct my money/time to be most effective.
You can expand outward from 3 issues as you find things that intersect, but be careful. You are more effective when you point maximum effort towards a few issues than you are pointing almost no effort towards every issue.
These three steps will free you up to actually be of help to the world, rather than feeling panicked that it’s so messed up, and not knowing where to start.