Eostre wrote:Abbys wrote:
but i don't feel empathetic towards people (offline) either, unless i personally know them.
when the school shooting in texas happened (uvalade), i remember talking to someone about it irl (to be fair, they were female + had kids) but she just started literally crying when talking to me about it because she felt so bad for the dead kids and their family.
it feels as if i'm lacking something. obviously i would feel terrible if i personally knew any of the victims but still, i want to feel more human.
there is always the school of moral philosophy that will argue that the farther we are distanced from the person or happening experiencing something, the less we care about it. we do not have the capacity to care about everything or everyone, so the people we are closer to and who make a real impact in our lives - those we normally care for first and the strongest. so a online stranger on the other side would be quite far away from lets say a sister or parental figure.
and you also got just the mood of being used to reading bad news and watching horrible things go down so we start reacting less to it bc it has become more normalized to us.
to be fair, i do not feel much for school shootings in the us. like i can't affect them. yes they are bad, and yes i wish they didn't happen. but it's not like i stop my day to cry about something half a world away. maybe i'll shed a tear if i go in and decide to really read up on the details on it, but it's not good for me so i don't. onthe other hand, when it was closer to home like Utøya in 2011, I was definitively just in shock and crying bc it felt so much closer and i actually experienced the impact of it on the ppl around me and society in genereal..
that is right. that's why so many ask themselves "how can this parent empathize with their kid who murdered someone in coldblood, if it was my kid, i would want them dead" but how many of the people who say that would actually stick with their morals if it indeed was their child to committed the murder? NOOOT many.