Empathy can return

I received a few texts from friends when Charlie Kirk was shot last week, alerting me of the news. After taking a beat to remember who he was (excuse me if I can’t recall each individual white guy with that haircut standing next to Trump), I experienced a very strange sensation: I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel — if anything at all.

I don’t want anyone to be murdered, not for any reason. Yet I felt particularly devoid of emotion at what was pretty clearly a horrible incident.

Later that day, a friend posted this video to her Instagram stories, in which a therapist suggested that, “It makes sense if you don’t feel a deep well of empathy for someone who made a career out of refusing to show it for others.” While I’m not necessarily in the habit of drawing insight from therapist influencers, I was still struck by one point he made in particular: “[Y]our compassion has limits and those limits are often shaped by how much compassion someone showed in their lifetime.”

I dare say that I wasn’t the only one who felt numb to Kirk’s death, and I would guess this was largely caused by two major factors: One, as our internet shrink suggested, it’s tough to mourn for a person who openly hated whole groups of people, and encouraged others to agree with him. Second, it’s possible to struggle with any emotion around violence when it’s become such a normal part of life.

The day after the shooting at Utah Valley University, The Atlantic’s Will Gottsegen wrote in the magazine’s newsletter about the ubiquity of Kirk’s assassination video online. I also saw the short and gruesome video clip, without any intent to watch it. Within about 24 hours, one video that Gottsegen stumbled upon on X — where videos automatically play — had racked up 8.8 million views. Even if you don’t choose to witness violence, we are unwittingly fed the content on our devices.

“Our modern parade of digital gore corrodes not just the individuals who are exposed to it, but also the prospect of social cohesion more broadly,” Gottsegen wrote. A short, graphic video is autoplayed for you, and you’re encouraged to offer a quick, hot take. Rather than sit together and digest what we’ve seen, the need to react fast creates panic and venom.

The Vietnam War was the first time a major conflict was realistically televised for viewers, and historians have argued that the footage made Americans empathize more deeply with the boys fighting overseas — and that, in turn, may have boosted opposition to the war. The day after President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection, he said, “I thought of the many times each week when television brings the war into the American home. No one can say exactly what effect those vivid scenes have on American opinion.”

But in the 1960s, seeing violence broadcast in your own living room was new and jarring. That’s hardly the case today. How many times have we seen videos of frantic parents outside of school shootings? Or security camera footage of officers shooting Black men? We’re so accustomed to these scenes that, upon receiving the first news alert, we can already picture what’s unfolding in our minds.

This is not, however, the Hater’s Guide to Living Numb. When I started researching whether we’re in an empathy deficit, I actually found reason to believe that compassion may be back, baby. Psychologists have been measuring empathy since the late 1970s, and a 2011 study explored the trends in those surveys. At that time, the results showed that empathy in the U.S. had plummeted. However (!!!), the research team published an update in late 2023 that showed empathy among young Americans actually made a comeback and reached levels indistinguishable from the highs of the 1970s.

You can argue that 2023 was before Trump was reelected, and before this most recent spate of violence. But the study’s lead author Sara Konrath has tried to highlight something else her work has shown: There’s more fluidity to empathy than previously thought.

Garrett Bucks, who writes The White Pages newsletter, had a great one-two punch in a recent post’s headline and subhed:

“How do you respond when a famous person whose ideology you abhor is shot and killed?
The same way you respond to every death in a world too full of it”

Bucks goes on to say, “I hope that you respond to the famous conservative activist being shot the same way you have long been responding to a world where the best thing about life — that we get to do it with each other — has been so thoroughly obscured and degraded. I hope that yesterday and today and tomorrow you are awed by life, by the fact that we are given a certain amount of time to care deeply for one another.”

The way I understood Bucks’s newsletter was this: The best way to show empathy for one is to show empathy for all. If the research does show that empathy can come and go, that means we can bring it back. We have to do it daily and we have to do it for everyone, not just the ones we deem worthy. 

I felt nothing at the news of Kirk’s death because we live in a world that makes it easy to be unempathetic, to consume what’s given and to react. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. We have to practice more compassion, all the time.