Cultural Empathy in Crisis
When compassion became unsafe, and distance became self-defense.
When Empathy Became Unsafe
On March 21, 2025, ten-year-old Autumn Bushman died by suicide in Roanoke County, Virginia. Her teachers and classmates described her as unusually empathetic. She stood up for teased students, sat beside the ones who were alone, and offered protection in quiet, deliberate ways. Autumn wasn’t confrontational; she was kind. Her kindness made her a target. Her family raised concerns with the school, but administrators claimed the situation had been “handled.” Nothing changed. When her mother tried to escalate the issue, Autumn whispered, “You’re just going to make it worse.” She already understood what it means to care in a world that punishes tenderness.
This should not have happened. It reflects something that has become increasingly common: a fear of being open, a reflexive retreat into performance, detachment, or silence. Across the world, people are overwhelmed. The speed of digital life, the flood of crisis imagery, and the demand for constant opinion have narrowed our emotional bandwidth. News cycles move faster than comprehension. Empathy feels risky, and trust feels naive. Even during shared hardship, many people no longer believe their pain will be met with understanding.
Kindness, once seen as a civic expectation, now feels conditional. Online, aggression is more visible than mutual understanding. Algorithms reward outrage, and content designed to provoke gets boosted. As a result, sincerity disappears and disruption wins. Over time, users learn to hold back, but only in specific ways. To be kind is to risk invisibility, but to be angry is to be heard.
When someone shares a personal story online about loss, illness, or fear, they are often met not with care but with criticism. Disclosures are dissected for tone, motive, or correctness. Even well-intentioned posts are reframed as self-serving. Slowly, people learn not to speak at all. Not because they have nothing to say, but because they no longer trust anyone to hear them cleanly.
The structures that once supported relational depth, such as slow friendships, shared rituals, and daily contact, have frayed. In their place, we now have speed, brevity, and performance. Conversations are short, and emotions are compressed. Misunderstandings move faster than clarification. There is little space to explain, and even less patience to listen.
This essay traces how cultural empathy was weakened, why it matters, and what it might take to restore it.
What Happened to Cultural Empathy?
Cultural empathy didn’t collapse all at once. It eroded under pressure, psychological, social, and digital. Online platforms taught people to respond quickly and defensively. The more hostile the post, the wider its reach. The more careful the voice, the more likely it was to be ignored. In this environment, many people stopped trying to connect and focused instead on protecting themselves.
At the same time, political rhetoric began modeling cruelty as strength. President Donald Trump normalized a style of speech centered on ridicule and blame. Scholars documented a rise in antagonistic language, starting with the 2016 election. Trump’s language didn’t just influence policy; it reshaped culture. As public discourse hardened, people learned to approach difference with suspicion. No one stopped caring, but they stopped feeling safe enough to show it.
Meanwhile, the rise of red pill ideology reframed empathy as weakness. Young boys were drawn into content that promised confidence and control. Influencers like Andrew Tate taught that vulnerability was a trap, and that women were competitors to be managed. Wrapped in the language of self-mastery, this worldview taught boys to distrust their emotions and reject care from others.
The Netflix miniseries Adolescence captured this shift. The show follows 13-year-old Jamie Miller, who is arrested for the murder of a female classmate. It traces his radicalization through online misogynistic forums, not as a singular event, but as a slow, cultural reprogramming. The story is fictional, but the context is not.
Even efforts to restore empathy have sometimes backfired. The backlash against “wokeism” reframed empathy itself as suspicious. Terms like “cancel culture” are now used to reject almost any call for reflection or accountability. At the same time, some online justice movements have relied more on public shaming than genuine repair. This mix of overcorrection and bad-faith pushback made empathy feel less like a shared value and more like a political trap.
The COVID-19 pandemic only widened the fracture. Acts of care like wearing a mask or checking on a neighbor were politicized. Grief became a private burden. Mourning had no shared ritual. Even small expressions of care, like offering help or showing grief, became risky; not because of the virus, but because those gestures were so easily politicized. Without public guidance or communal processing, people turned inward. They didn’t stop caring, but they stopped showing it.
These patterns live in the same emotional climate. Vulnerability is framed as liability. Dominance is mistaken for strength. Empathy isn’t gone. However, it has been slowly discouraged until people no longer recognize it as necessary.
Why Does This Matter?
Disconnection is everywhere. People feel alone in crowded rooms, unseen in relationships, and unsafe inside their thoughts. Many describe a growing sense of invisibility. Not because no one is around, but because few know how to stay present when others speak truthfully.
This kind of isolation is not theoretical. In 2023, over 49,000 people in the United States died by suicide. Rates of homelessness among unaccompanied youth rose 10 percent between 2023 and 2024. On a single night, more than 38,000 young people were counted as homeless, most of them between 18 and 24. These are not isolated outcomes. They are symptoms of something more profound: a culture that no longer teaches people how to hold one another.
Technology alone cannot explain this loss. At the root of American life is a myth of self-reliance. Strength is defined by independence. Dependence is treated as weakness. From childhood, people are taught to be autonomous, keep their pain to themselves, and never burden others with need. This belief runs through our schools, our healthcare, and our families. It turns care into a private task. It treats mutuality as risk.
Eventually, this logic shapes how people respond to others. If everyone is expected to manage their pain, then seeing someone else struggle becomes an intrusion. Trust erodes. Sincerity looks suspicious. People pull away, not because they don’t care, but because they’ve never seen care modeled in a way that feels safe to replicate.
Humans are not built for this. Our nervous systems regulate through closeness, and our healing depends on being known. When those needs are denied, the body compensates and grows cautious. Life begins to feel like something to endure, not something to inhabit. What should feel urgent, such as grief, disconnection, and tenderness, begins to feel normal. And what should feel normal, like being seen or held, starts to feel out of reach.
Empathy is not decorative. It is what lets people stay close to one another without shutting down. Without it, trust thins, conversations fracture, and suffering is no longer named, not because it has gone away but because no one knows how to respond. Empathy does not fix what is broken, but keeps people close enough to survive it.
Where Do We See Hope?
Hope does not return through institutions. It does not arrive in speeches or campaigns. It shows up quietly, without reward, when someone chooses to stay present even when walking away would be easier. A friend stays after the apology. A neighbor reaches out without needing a reason. These gestures do not rebuild systems. They signal that not everything has gone numb.
Cultural empathy will not return through policies or platforms. Proximity is what begins repair—when someone remains engaged through discomfort, not to perform, but to witness. Presence does not seek recognition. It offers repair without blame and connection without spectacle. These moments are difficult, often unspoken, and easy to miss. Most people have never been taught how to name genuine care, so they either dismiss it or misread it when it happens. A few people remembering how to stay present is enough to keep empathy alive.
Empathy will not return through campaigns or branding. Cultural repair begins when care is treated as a daily obligation, not an emotional indulgence. Institutions will not teach this, and digital platforms are structured to suppress it. The responsibility belongs to individuals willing to act even without recognition.
If you’ve made it here, thank you so much for reading all the way through. I hope this held something true for you, because I know how heavy the world feels right now, and I don’t take your attention for granted. I hope to help others name things they feel but haven’t had space to say. Cultural empathy hasn’t vanished, but it does need people willing to keep it alive.
This is truly sad and it's getting worse. And that's why you're here. That's why I'm here. That's the purpose of some writers here- to try to make the voice louder even though we can't change the world, we can save some 🙏🏽❤️
This broke my heart. Autumn was only ten, and she was doing something a lot of adults still struggle to do: showing up for others with quiet, steady kindness. And that made her a target. Not because she did anything wrong, but because this world so often punishes softness. When she told her mom, “You’re just going to make it worse,”, she already understood the quiet cost of caring too much in a system that sees empathy as a threat.
What’s hard is how familiar this feels. So many people have been worn down by a world that treats care like a risk. The internet makes everything faster, more reactive. And instead of pausing to understand each other, we start scanning for what’s “off,” for what could be twisted or torn apart. So people stop sharing because it feels like no one will hold it gently if they do.
There's a reminder that healing doesn’t come in big sweeping gestures, it’s in the small, human moments. When someone stays with you through the hard parts. When someone doesn’t look away. That kind of presence doesn’t get headlines, but it’s everything. That’s how empathy survives: through people choosing to show up, quietly and without needing to be seen for it. And honestly, that gives me hope.