Empathy Fatigue

 

At some point, everyone runs out of compassion.

It’s not a dramatic collapse, more like a slow leak. One day you realize that hearing about other people’s pain feels like scrolling through weather updates: vaguely relevant, but not worth stopping for.

We call it “empathy fatigue.”

It sounds medical, clinical, like burnout, but for the soul. It lets us pretend it’s not moral decay, just biology doing its thing.

You watch the news, another tragedy, another cause, and you feel the flicker of something, but it’s thin. You’ve felt this too many times before. You can’t grieve everyone, can’t save anyone, can’t even reply to every “how are you?” text. You’re not heartless; you’re just maxed out.

And yet, there’s this quiet guilt humming beneath it all. Because you know you used to feel things more deeply. You used to care. But caring has become exhausting, and exhaustion has become normal, and normal has become “functioning.”

In offices, they call it professionalism.

In relationships, boundaries.

Online, awareness.

But mostly, it’s emotional autopilot, a polite survival mechanism with decent grammar and dead eyes.

We live in a culture that rewards emotional literacy, as long as it’s posted, packaged, and palatable. Everyone’s “healing,” “checking in,” “creating safe spaces.” Meanwhile, the real empathy, the kind that’s messy, inconvenient, and unrewarded, quietly retires, unthanked.

And maybe that’s fine. Maybe this is the cost of seeing everything.

Too much exposure, not enough capacity. We were never built to process every cry for help, every injustice, every heartbreak at once. The world got louder; our hearts didn’t evolve fast enough to keep up.

But still, there’s a part of us that misses it. The ache of caring. The weight of being moved by something real. We'd trade the numb comfort for one clean shot of sincerity, if we could trust it to last.

Until then, we just keep scrolling, nodding, empathizing performatively, the modern ritual of pretending to feel, together. Another day in paradise, right?

And today, I went to the doctor.

I sat there thinking maybe this dull, persistent ache in my back would finally make sense, or better yet, just disappear. Maybe I’d get a small mercy, a clean scan, a new pill, a happy ending. Maybe, for once, I could stop being the outlier.

Instead, I’m told it’s affecting my spinal cord.

And there it is, that quiet click of acceptance. And in that moment it hits me: I don’t need to provide amusement or enjoyment. I don’t need to receive amusement or enjoyment. I’m completely fine with that. Because no amount of good is worth how terrible this feels.

It’s just a complete waste of f***ing time.