Arraignment of the Common Man — How we Have Become Apathetic

Ashwary Sharma

A few days ago, my friend told me that she quit drinking coffee. On asking the reason, she explained how so much water is wasted in the production of coffee, making it very unsustainable and harmful for the environment. So, she took a stand to take no part in it.

Yesterday, during a break, a colleague told me that he is trying to eliminate sugar from his diet. I assumed it must be for health-related reasons because the ills of sugar consumption are well known. But his reason was entirely different. He told me about a book he read which talks about how big sugarcane farmers exploit small farmers by lobbying with the government to get favorable allocation of irrigation lines. He looked frustrated by the fact that not many people knew about this, and even those who know do nothing about it. And then he asked me — “how can they not care? Do you not care?” My spontaneous reply to his question was — “no, I don’t care.” He just gave me a look and we went back to attend to our work.

I did not expect that I would be so blunt about it. I could have given a standard reply by saying something like “it is sad” or “it is disheartening.” But such a reply would be devoid of any real meaning, because, in reality, I clearly do not care. How can I? There are simply too many things to care about.

The ‘common man’ is always accused of being self-indulgent and too busy in his own life. It has often been pointed out how people are indifferent about the world they live in, sheepishly going about their lives not worrying about the bigger things. And that people live in ignorance without thinking deeply about things. Some say that we, as a society, have become apathetic. So, how have we reached this stage? Is the ‘common man’ to blame?

Imagine you are watching the news on TV — the reporter is going on endlessly about the racial violence in the US, then you receive a text message from your friend. Your friend, who cares a lot about the environment, has shared a web link of an article that reports that the Chinese Paddlefish, which was one of the world’s largest fish, has gone extinct. Before you have a chance to reply to your friend, you get a Twitter notification. You open Twitter to find out that #justicefortribals is on-trend. Many people are tweeting about their displeasure at a Supreme Court order declaring tribal “occupation” of a certain forest as illegal. You read the tweets and notice the insensitivity and intolerance some people display on social media. Feeling exasperated, you are now seeking an escape to something cheery and lighthearted. You log in to your Netflix account. Browsing through your recommendation, you are intrigued by a documentary titled ‘Cowspiracy’. It talks about how the cattle industry is a major contributor to climate change.

I am sure anyone who is on a similar level of privilege as me (i.e. most of you) can relate to the turn of events mentioned in the preceding paragraph. There are many events in our daily life which call for our attention. Many of them relate, not just to our immediate surrounding, but to the larger world that we live in. Our world is a very well-connected place. We have unprecedented access to information. I would not be wrong in saying that we come across negative news more often than positive news. Reading about these incidences evoke feelings of sadness, dissatisfaction, frustration, disappointment, and, at times, rage. We feel low as we try to understand and share the feelings of people going through these bad experiences in their life. In other words, these events evoke empathy.

Let me very briefly explain what I mean by empathy. When we witness or learn about what is happening to others, we not only see it but also feel what would happen if we had been in a similar circumstance. We respond with our emotions and sensations as if we felt the same. Empathy comes naturally to any ordinary person because it serves many important social functions. Speaking from an evolutionary perspective, empathizing helps us understand our lives better by learning from the experience of others. It allows us to feel something just by perceiving the other person’s experience thereby allowing us to learn more about the world. Learning is most effective when there is an emotion attached to it, and that is what empathizing allows us to do. Another purpose of empathy is to promote social justice.

It is clear that empathy serves important social and evolutionary functions. But what happens if there is too much of it? The world is changing fast and we are not evolving fast enough. The amount of people we interact with has grown exponentially. We are no longer living in a time where our tribe is the only group of people we had to care about. Now, we have access to the whole world. A man sitting in India can learn about a crime which took place in Canada as soon as it is reported, and countless other things. We are surrounded by such information which, because of our ability to empathize, evoke negative feelings in us. Naturally, we do not wish to remain in a state of constant sadness.

There is too much of a single emotional response and we are not configured for this overload; so, to cope with it, we eventually learn to shut it off.

We cannot spend our whole day feeling bad about something happening in some remote corner of the world. Over time, we learn to ‘manage’ this overload by becoming indifferent. Probably the overload of empathy has given rise to widespread apathy.

Different people have different coping mechanisms to deal with this overload. As absurd as it may sound, some may choose to curate their emotional response by empathizing with some situations while choosing to remain indifferent to others.

So, in short, one cannot care about everything. It is simply not possible, and I would argue, emotionally unsustainable.

So, let us come back to our common man who is too busy in his life. Managing life in itself is a momentous task. Arranging three meals a day, taking care of self and family, maintaining work-life balance — all these tasks are not easy. It takes a lot of time and energy to manage oneself and their daily life. The expectation that people should care about everything is unrealistic. It is not wrong if we only care about our immediate environment — the things that concern us directly — because after all, that is what we are configured to do.

On a personal level, we must come to terms with the fact that it is not possible to care about everything, and sometimes, it is okay to say — “I don’t care.”