Do You Think Humans Are Becoming More or Less Empathetic?

Today, we live in a time when people have stopped sensing one another. For instance, Hortulanus, Machielse, and Meeuwesen’s “Social Isolation in Modern Society” explored how social isolation manifests in contemporary societies, showing the decline in social contacts and emotional connections among people. Also, Eric Klinenberg’s study, “Social Isolation, Loneliness, and Living Alone: Identifying the Risks for Public Health,” discussed the rise of living alone and social isolation, highlighting how people increasingly live in isolation and experience loneliness despite being surrounded by others, with significant social and health consequences.

While sociologists and scholars write about it, we feel this phenomenon most clearly in our daily lives. We do not want to see and feel others if we do not see any benefit in doing so for ourselves. We thus lock ourselves in our own shells.

But if we do not feel others, i.e., someone else outside of ourselves, if we do not feel ourselves within them, then we do not feel the world at all.

We need to always see ourselves through someone else. Without others, there is no mirror, reflection, or real self-perception.

Today, we view ourselves as ugly. Why? It is because we have shut ourselves off. We have closed ourselves inward, limited ourselves, and decided that we do not want to see anyone except ourselves. That is the world we live in: our tiny, egoistic world where only “I” exist.

If we do not let anyone into our heart, and we do not enter anyone else’s, we create a lonely and ugly world. In that world, when we look around, we see only “me.”

This stage of human evolution is leading us to recognize the evil of living solely according to our self-serving desires. When we feel our completely self-serving state as terrible, that it leads to increasing loneliness, depression, anxiety, stress, as well as mental and physiological health issues, among many other problems, we will then start waking up to a new trajectory of our attitudes: to prioritize benefiting others over self-serving benefit. At that stage, we will be on course to opening up a new harmonious and peaceful world.