There's more than one empathy crisis

[marmar]

There’s more than one empathy crisis
Empathy among Americans has diminished notably in recent decades. The result is that it's become a superpower

By Andi Zeisler
Senior Writer
Published March 30, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Azra remembers most of the details about the night in 2021 when she started to feel too much. “I was in our basement watching ‘The Crown’ and scrolling my phone and drinking the last bag of fancy tea my sister had sent me for my birthday. We’d come back from spending Thanksgiving with my husband’s family. I saw a news item about a young guy who killed his entire family: mother, father, 15-year-old sister.” And then she was on the floor crying harder than she’d ever cried in her life. “My husband ran downstairs because he thought one of my parents had died. He kept asking, ‘What’s wrong? What happened?’ and I didn’t know. I couldn’t stop.”

She wasn’t previously a big crier, Azra says; and, for better or worse, as a high-school administrator she was so accustomed to hearing about mass shootings that she sometimes worried about growing callous to news of them. Her family had emigrated to the United States from the former Yugoslavia, and she and her sister were in grade school when the Serbo-Croation war began. “My grandparents were still there, and every day I asked my father if they were still alive until he got mad and was like, ‘Stop asking me this.’ From him I got the belief that strength was keeping pain and death and war sealed off from the rest of my thoughts.”

....(snip)....

The internet was newly full of empaths at the time — people who described themselves having a heightened sensitivity to the emotions and stressors of those around them that caused them to keenly experience the pain, anxiety and grief of others. Instagram Reels and TikToks bearing the hashtag #empath were full of explainers (“6 signs you might be an empath”, “The empath-astrology connection”) and advice for empaths on protecting their peace and setting boundaries with others. As with so many self-applied labels that enter the cultural lexicon via social media, “empath” isn’t a particularly precise term; in this case, its origins are literally fantastical: The term seems to have originated in science fiction in the mid-20th century to describe characters with a supernatural ability to feel what others are feeling, telepaths of mood and emotion who were often overwhelmed and not sure what emotions actually belonged to them.

....(snip)....

That humans feel things deeply and are driven to connect to other humans and feel a responsibility to the world was once a thing that could, for the most part, go without saying. But it’s undeniable that a dearth of empathy has become a feature of 21st-century life. A 2010 University of Michigan study found that college students reported levels of empathy that reflected a decrease of 40% from those reported in previous decades. In 2006, then-senator Barack Obama drew attention to what he called a national empathy deficit; the willful memory-holing of how much humanity was literally and figuratively lost with COVID and the impact on health-care workers has led to a prolonged state of compassion fatigue. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/30/theres-more-than-one-empathy-crisis/