Unfettered empathy comes at a price. Healthcare workers, educators, psychologists, and even close friends know this. When one is exposed daily to the suffering of others, one may end up experiencing a series of psychobiological processes that erode their capacity for emotional connection. In some way, exposure to trauma, whether one's own or someone else's, leads individuals toward habituation, and in the worst cases, toward indifference. For decades, this psychological process has been associated with people who work with vulnerable groups. A recent example is a systematic review published in 2024 on healthcare professionals in sub-Saharan Africa, which shows particularly high levels of "compassion fatigue."

The authors point out that this risk increases in contexts of prolonged crises, as occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. In such circumstances, the combination of excessive workload, resource scarcity, and moral stress intensifies emotional exhaustion. However, compassion fatigue may have spread beyond certain professional sectors. Could this be becoming a structural phenomenon?, some wonder, given the ways in which information about human suffering circulates today.

Millennials and subsequent generations have grown up in a media ecosystem marked by information overload. Never before have we been so exposed to such explicit accounts of global crises: wars, climate disasters, humanitarian emergencies… The sheer volume of emotional stimuli is so overwhelming that our nervous systems can barely process them all. There was a time when a single photograph could stop the world. Today, images of devastated cities flash across the screen as fleetingly as a sneaker commercial. The suffering is still there, but we receive it in a continuous stream that leaves little room for pause. We have learned to live with the pain, to manage it, to dose it until it becomes bearable.

Increasingly, research is analyzing news avoidance as a possible consequence of information overload. Some studies show that the negative emotions generated by the news can provoke two seemingly opposite reactions. On the one hand, many people become “trapped” in the compulsive consumption of information—what is now known as “doomscrolling”. On the other hand, when the emotional burden accumulates, this same unease can lead to avoiding certain topics or even completely disconnecting from current events. In other words, crises can generate both intense attention and extreme detachment.

This could be problematic because contemporary democracies are based on the idea that we are capable of caring for people we don't know. If constant exposure to disaster erodes that concern, the problem transcends the psychological and reaches the political. Therefore, empathy fatigue can affect the collective willingness to sustain long and costly commitments, whether they be climate policies, the reception of refugees, or reconstruction processes after a war.

On this issue, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has insisted that emotions are not necessarily irrational, as they contain implicit judgments about what we value. If we allow media saturation to erode our sensitivity, in addition to changing our mood, it will also reconfigure our moral framework. What once seemed intolerable gradually becomes part of our everyday reality.

Under a sociopolitical paradigm in which suffering circulates at an unprecedented rate, empathy and compassion risk being exhausted before they can become commitment. The question in these times, then, is how to preserve a sensitivity capable of sustaining collective responsibility. If the pain of others ceases to challenge us, we risk normalizing what should continue to be unbearable.

The original article was published in Spanish at Ethic.es