Back in June, the world watched in suspense as the United States and Canadian Search Guard embarked on a search and rescue mission to find the Titan submersible, which went missing during an extreme tourist expedition to the Titanic shipwreck. Once it came to light several billionaires were aboard, an “eat the rich” sentiment spread across left-wing corners of the internet.

Before the sub’s fate was confirmed, people imagined the mega-rich struggling to survive the dwindling oxygen supply and harsh deep underwater environment and couldn’t help but mock the absurdity of the situation. Someone created an oxygen supply countdown; memes circulated about orcas eating them alive; TikTok videos about how much money the bereaved wives were about to inherit racked up thousands of views. There were even reports the movie Titanic and its iconic Celine Dion theme song, “My Heart Will Go On” saw streaming surges as a reaction. It soon came to light that the sub had imploded, killing all onboard instantly – but the memes and jokes didn’t stop coming.

Many speculated the onslaught of jokes was due to empathy fatigue – the emotional and physical exhaustion that can result from having to constantly empathise with others. The concept is age-old, but has become a particularly hot talking point since the pandemic: a time when we listened to the global death toll climb from single to triple digits and into the millions and it became increasingly difficult to comprehend the number of lives lost. “There is a sense in which people’s coping reserves are sort of finite entities,” Joe Ruzek, a PTSD researcher at Palo Alto University told The Atlantic in 2021. “So if you have to cope a whole lot… you can kind of diminish your resources.” But in the history of calamity – has humankind ever been truly ‘proportionally’ compassionate in its response to tragedy? Has there ever been a way to react ‘normally’ to awful news?

Expressing a lack of empathy or compassion to the horrors of the world is hardly a novelty. Richard Burton wrote of his own apathy towards tragedy in his 1621 book, The Anatomy of Melancholy. “I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged…” he wrote, listing a wide range of disasters. His solution to the deluge of bad news was essentially to log off, touch grass, and “rub on in a strictly private life”.

Today, most people would wager that Burton’s choice to keep his head buried in the sand is a position of extreme privilege, à la Daphne and Cameron from White Lotus. It’s “white person shit”: not everyone has the luxury of being so shielded from injustice that they can simply ‘opt out’ of caring. But while people in 2023 might shy away from admitting to not keeping up with current affairs, it’s still difficult to muster up the ‘appropriate’ amount of empathy for each dreadful story reported. And what even is ‘appropriate’ anyway?

Timothy Recuber is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Smith College, and researches how we consume catastrophe through mass media and the toll this has on emotions. He has extensively written about the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2007 Virginia Tech Shootings. “Empathy definitely has inherent limitations that people don’t consider,” he tells Dazed, explaining that there is no way to make yourself empathise ‘more’ when 500 people face a tragedy versus when five people do (and vice-versa).

Recuber explains that people have complained about ‘desensitisation’ to troubling news for “as long as people have been able to learn about the suffering of others from a distance,” but adds that social media has accelerated a layer of complexity to the issue. “Social media can make us feel more overwhelmed, a little bit more quickly,” he says.

“The consequences of crises and disasters almost always fall on the poorest and least powerful, while the rich almost always come out unscathed” – Timothy Recuber

Take the statement “sending thoughts and prayers”: the condolence has been repeated so often that it now trends on almost every social media platform after a mass shooting and has subsequently lost its meaning (and even become a meme). When in the United States, more Americans died of gun-related injuries than any other year on record in 2021, and mass shootings are more avoidable with the implementation of gun restrictions, the lack of reform causes the public to become tired, even cynical, when another school or university is shot up with no change to the status quo. The submersible implosion was similarly avoidable – albeit devastating, the public reacted less empathetically since the sub was operated by an unreliable video game controller and built by a CEO with no regard for health and safety requirements. Recuber explains that it’s “easier to empathise” when victims are “clearly ‘innocent’” or when a tragedy was totally unavoidable.

It also often seems to be the case that, in general, the public and news organisations seem to pay less attention to stories which impact the marginalised – such as refugees, people of colour, people living in poverty. Many contrasted the attention poured on the missing sub against the relatively quiet coverage of the migrant ship that sank off the coast of Greece and lost between 500 and 750 passengers in early June. There almost seems to be an expectation that bad things ‘just happen’ to society’s most vulnerable – our ears, therefore, prick up a bit when we hear about something awful happening to society’s most privileged. “The consequences of crises and disasters almost always fall on the poorest and least powerful, while the rich almost always come out unscathed,” Recuber explains.

Although some may argue it’s leaving us feeling overwhelmed and stunted, arguably, social media can also help us empathise with individual victims. Citizen journalism has the power to hold the public’s attention and allows marginalised groups to share discriminatory acts of hatred which might not have been picked up by mainstream news organisations: notably, the murder of George Floyd shone a light on police brutality in a particularly resonant way. “That’s not a story that would have been reported on without social media,” argues Recuber. 

Often people mistake having empathy as a way to identify with being a ‘good person’. But empathy isn’t a magic elixir that can resurrect someone back from the dead, stop a natural disaster or clean our poor air quality. And as Recuber says, it’s often not as simple as willing yourself to ‘amp up’ your own empathy levels so you’re always responding to deaths and disasters with the ‘appropriate’ amount of concern. But empathy is still a powerful political tool: only it’s more useful to try and empathise with society’s most vulnerable before tragedy strikes.

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