It’s a cycle we know much too well. A humanitarian disaster happens. A mass shooting occurs. The media spends a week paddling non-stop headlines about the unprecedented nature of the event. Social media runs amok with messages of action and outrage.

Not even a few days later, it all falls away. The world moves on to a different topic and event, even when these people continue to suffer and no change has been made. As a culture, we lose our empathy for these people and forget about them entirely.

Empathy is one of the most basic human values, an emotion that differentiates us from other primates. Yet we have chosen to withhold this essential trait from others.

Whether it’s due to compassion fatigue onset by repeated exposure to traumatic events on the news or a Eurocentric focus for the world’s media, we have decided that certain people deserve our empathy, effectively dehumanizing everyone else.

Paris Nanterre University graduate student Julien Brugeron defines this phenomenon as selective empathy. She explains that this choice of where we direct our demonstration of understanding for other people’s experiences can originate from a distance from the subject of our empathy.

One cause of this issue could be our collective compassion fatigue. In a 2022 American Psychological Association article, author Rebecca A. Clay delineates this term as the process through which we take on the suffering of other people or individuals, either through direct conversation or through exposure via media like the news.

Health writer Jamie Ducharme explains how experts believe that almost the entire world, after going through the devastating COVID-19 pandemic and amid numerous global conflicts, has reached a point of total compassion fatigue. She goes on to detail how repeated exposure to such horrible events has taken a significant toll on our emotional capacity, preventing us from even attempting to understand what the people around us are going through.

Another major contributing factor is our inherent desire to categorize everything around us. In a January 2021 Forbes article, professor of clinical psychology Dr. Andrew Hartz calls this behavior splitting, originating from our hunter-gatherer roots. Through ‘splitting’, we could differentiate between who was part of our tribe and who was our enemy.

However, in a time when bison have been replaced by Big Macs and spears by SnapChat, we no longer have a use for this instinct. Instead, it causes us to label the people around us as either part of our group or as the outsiders, the others.

The harms of this empathy epidemic can be seen directly in our understanding of global issues. One of the most covered recent events, and rightfully so, was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which led to the displacement of millions of people.

But despite the importance of highlighting the suffering of the Ukrainian people, the media coverage of this issue was also concerning. Journalists on air from channels ranging from Poland to France to the United Kingdom expressed their shock at the conflict, calling Ukraine “civilized” and saying Ukrainians were “like us”.

The comparisons they made were even more dehumanizing, stating that Ukraine wasn’t “like Iraq or Afghanistan” and that “we aren’t talking about Syrians fleeing…we’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours”.

But just because someone doesn’t look like us does not mean we can minimize their experiences. But the truth is that no matter what place someone is from, their issues are valid and we should try to understand them.

Thinking like this normalizes tragedy in places outside the West, simply excusing it as part of the culture. But the truth is that no matter what place someone is from, their issues are valid and we should try to understand them.

It doesn’t matter what part of the world they’re from. They are humans, just like us. That is what we have forgotten. In our quest for similarity, we have lost our shared humanity.

We ignore the suffering of refugees because they don’t look like us. We overlook the devastation of school shootings because advocates for gun reform are on the opposite side of the political aisle. We minimize experiences of police brutality because it’s not what we go through. And as a result, people die and suffer every single day.

It is high time that we stop choosing where our empathy goes. We cannot simply ignore the struggles of people who aren’t like us. It is our responsibility as humans to make the effort to understand those different from us and to empathize with them.

The ability to empathize and understand each other is what makes humans different from every other species. We are built to care, yet we have strayed from our primal instincts.

As an October 2019 Manoa News article explains, we can return to what they call ‘universal empathy’ through two main steps.

First, we have to begin practicing perspective-taking, meaning we put ourselves in the shoes of people completely different from us and try to understand them and their experiences.

Secondly, we need to expose ourselves to diversity, through purposeful media selection. Choose to watch movies and read books about groups you might not know anything about.

If we can do this, we can create a world where everyone is cared for and understood. We can finally put an end to our cycle of tragedy and create a better, more empathetic world for all.