In today’s world, something essential is slipping through our fingers. We are more connected than ever, yet increasingly distant, and the empathy crisis starts exactly there. Behind every screen there is a feed designed to keep us looking, and behind every feed there are stories we have learned to scroll past.

Empathy, the ability to feel what another person feels, is not disappearing because people have become cruel. It is fading because our attention has been captured by something else: the constant work of building, protecting and promoting the self.

The empathy crisis and the age of the individual

For decades we have been told that happiness is a personal project. Buy the right things, follow the right routine, optimise your body, your career, your image. The message is seductive because it promises control. But it carries a hidden cost: if everything is about me, then everyone else becomes background.

Individualism has given us freedom, and that freedom matters. The problem begins when it turns into indifference, when the success of the few is celebrated and the struggle of the many is treated as a private failure.

The forgotten children

The first to pay the price are those who cannot speak for themselves. Children growing up in poverty, children displaced by war, children working instead of studying, children left alone in front of screens while the adults around them are exhausted. They rarely trend. They do not have a marketing budget. They become invisible precisely because they are many.

Every society says it protects its children. The real test is not what we say, but where we put our time, our money and our attention.

Answering the empathy crisis: a practice, not a feeling

We often think of empathy as an emotion that either arrives or doesn’t. In reality it behaves more like a muscle. It grows when we use it, and it weakens when we don’t. A few habits can make a real difference:

• Spend less time consuming content about other people’s lives, and more time actually being present in them.
• Give an hour a month to a local association, a school or a shelter. Presence matters more than donations.
• Before buying something new, ask who made it and in what conditions, and who actually owns the brand.
• Listen to people whose lives look nothing like yours, without preparing your answer while they speak: that is where peace begins.

From spectators to participants

The world does not need more spectators who feel sad for a moment and then move on. It needs people who decide that what happens to a child on the other side of the city, or the other side of the world, is also their business.

Rebuilding empathy will not happen through a single campaign. It will happen in small, repeated choices: switching off, looking up, and reaching out. That is how a society stops forgetting its children.