Over the last few years, and especially more recently, I find myself opening the news and immediately thinking, “When did people stop caring for others?”
I see people my age forming communities around shared hatreds rather than shared passions. When you're younger, compassion and empathy are encouraged by everyone around you; from teachers to coaches to parents, the idea of treating others the way you want to be treated is drilled into your brain. But somewhere along the journey from child to adult, compassion stopped being a priority.
Everyone will only ever truly know one reality — their own — but we need to begin to learn about the realities of others. I look at the discourse political groups have made their priority and wonder if they have ever stopped to put themselves in the shoes of the people whose lives they work so hard to diminish. Why did immigration become an economic calculation instead of a humanitarian lifeline? Why are people who look or identify differently becoming framed as a threat to children? Why are we expected to accept entire civilizations being bombed off the map? Again and again, I come back to the same realization: we have lost our empathy, and without empathy, we will not survive.
As a country we need to realize that we live in a society that has never truly valued empathy, but with the technological world that we are in today, our indifference is amplified. I don’t want to sound like someone’s dad telling them to “put their phone down and go for a hike,” but the digital age has created the perfect breeding ground for this compassion deficit. Apps such as Instagram and X throw people into endless loops of agreement by rewarding outrage. Hatred that was once frowned upon, is now spread and rewarded by algorithms, and the feeling of resistance that people reward themselves with when they repost a shocking statistic or infographic will never be enough to combat our lack of true caring and understanding.
That’s where the humanities come in. Reading, writing, creating and listening are not just hobbies or “extras” to a practical education. They are acts of resistance to indifference. Literature lets us inhabit lives we will never live. Art allows us to feel the world through someone else’s eyes. History teaches us how others have suffered and endured. Philosophy asks us to think about what we owe each other as human beings. These disciplines train us in empathy. They demand we stretch our imaginations and remind us that compassion is not an abstract but a skill, and one we need to strengthen.
One of my professors always told our class that our time and attention are the most valuable things we have. Now more than ever, I understand what she meant. Attention is the root of empathy. When we give that attention to stories, ideas and creations outside our own lives, we practice compassion in its purest form.
We have a choice: keep giving our attention to the outrage machine, locked away in digital bubbles that conform to our existing biases, or read the stories of those who live differently, listen to voices that unsettle us and create and consume art that builds connection.
We attend a school with students from around the globe with departments that stretch from art history to aerospace engineering. We exist in the perfect community to begin to relearn and retrain our empathy. But we also live in a world where the humanities are seen as a waste of time and a “futureless” pursuit. To those who sit in their mandated English and history classes and constantly diminish the usefulness of their teachings; It is in the humanities that we learn how to imagine lives unlike our own, how to care across differences and how to rebuild compassion where it has been lost.
If we want to climb out of this rut of hatred and division, we need to begin again with the empathy, imagination and care that we were taught about in kindergarten. Because without compassion we will make no progress at all.
Ciah Courtney is an assistant sports editor and can be reached at ciah.courtney@ubspectrum.com
