When everything sucks, how do we keep caring?

I asked experts how we can sustain empathy as the world falls apart.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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On Thursday, a child in Derna, Libya, walks among buildings destroyed in massive floods. (Photo by Hamza Al Ahmar/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

It’s been a week of international horrors. Thousands dead and injured in Morocco’s earthquake. Even more thousands dead in a flood of Biblical proportions in Libya. Two extreme disasters in places foreign to the majority of Americans. Still, the worldwide shock has been real. The sheer number of dead, the scenes of tsunami-like flooding in a desert city. The endless white body bags.

Tens of thousands of people this week have entered a displacement purgatory that millions around the world have languished in for decades. These are disasters that will require years’ of aid.

Also in the news, but less noticed, has been the discovery of mass graves and ethnic killing in Darfur. More than 400,000 Sudanese have fled into neighboring Chad. “We are seeing the evidence of it starting again,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said of genocide after visiting a Chadian refugee camp Wednesday.

Also, Sudan, along with Ethiopia and several other countries in the region, are experiencing the worst food crisis in 40 years.

To recap: Nightmarish disasters in the Middle East, what looks to be a new genocide in Darfur, a famine in East Africa and multiple other major global conflicts, in addition to the war Ukraine. So what happens now?

Do we mobilize to help starving and desperate people in all these places? Maybe we donate to the Red Cross or another NGO? Or do we pay attention for a few days and say how awful it all is and then move along? If that’s what you do, I don’t blame you. It’s a lot.

I’ve long wondered about what I call the economy of caring. Why do some conflicts and disasters register, but not others? As a journalist heading back to Ukraine in a few weeks, I’ve been asking myself why I’m going there as opposed to any of these other places, let alone the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is still in conflict, and from which I’ve reported from over the years.

Certainly, the media bears blame; there’s limited space in newspapers, magazines, and on the nightly news — even on the boundless internet, journalists are always looking for the next story. Still, this is insufficient to explain what makes people care one minute and not the next. Something else is going on, and years ago, in piece I wrote for Foreign Policy magazine, I asked several experts to explain what it is. Here’s what I learned.

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In 2014, “Bring Back Our Girls” was a well-known campaign to help Nigerian schoolgirls who’d been kidnapped by a terrorist group called Boko Haram. I wondered at the time what made that story one that the media — and consumers of media — wanted to follow.

“Bring Back Our Girls was the function of not only a story that created empathy,” activist Gloria Steinem told me, “but an unfinished story, so our minds kept pushing at it, as if at a sore tooth.”

In other words, it was the lack of a resolution — and the potential of one coming — that grabbed attention. But Steinem said she feared that people lose interest in staying until the end when a resolution doesn’t come quickly enough. People are in it for the plot, she said, and they’ll turn their attention elsewhere when the twists stop happening.

“It’s been my experience that the single most important bridge to caring is not a fact or a statistic, it’s a story,” Steinem said.

We need a story.

Similarly, Columbia Journalism Professor Helen Benedict, who has written extensively about women and violence in the military both as a reporter and a novelist, told me that what will make people care is “putting oneself in another’s shoes. Using one’s imagination to break through myopia.”

We need empathy.

Steinem pointed out that people outside whatever country is in the news would continue to care if the victims and survivors weren’t so nameless and faceless. “If we knew even one of these girls,” she said of the Boko Haram victims, “empathy would follow. One person would stand for many more.”

We need to identify.

Dr. Frank Ochberg, a psychiatrist at Michigan State University and chairman emeritus of Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, told me: “We have to identify in order to care. We can’t just satisfy our curiosity. We need more than that. The human portraits have to evoke evolving emotion. If we just feel outrage or pity or even compassion, that isn’t enough. We need to go through the stages that draw us into life narratives, sustaining our attention, our belief that some significant denouement is on the horizon.”

We need a narrative.

Ochberg described a three-act process that occurs in the development of a heavy international story.

In “Act One,” the traumatic event is identified and described; for example, the Nigerian girls go missing and news stories pour forth with all known details. People begin to care. A lot. A hashtag carries things forward. For a little while, at least.

In “Act Two,” people “return to normalcy after great upheaval.” Here there are quiet, more contemplative dimensions to the international response; this is also the part of the story about the victim, about trauma and recovery.

In “Act Three,” there is “unrequited loss, pointless suffering, persistent evil.” People do not have the ability to easily tolerate this dark final act: the realization that there may be no happy resolution to reach, no transcendent truth, no meaning (think about the Holocaust, or the Rwandan genocide, or the thousands dead this week in Morocco and Libya). So, in an attempt to preserve ourselves emotionally, humans circle back to the parts of a story that are more easily digestible: the shock of an event, the personalized follow-up, the urgency of wanting and demanding to know what happens next.

“Our species does remember certain things ‘in our bones,’ and we have deep resonance with personal tragedies and with societal traumas,” Ochberg said. “[But] our species is also forgetful and easily bored. So, no wonder we lose interest in a calamity and go on to the next ‘Act One’ of a news cycle.”

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For years, the story of the Nigerian schoolgirls remained in Act Three. There was nothing good to report. There was not even very much to report at all; the Nigerian government was virtually silent on what it was doing to rescue the girls. From the media’s perspective, there were no headlines to be written. From a more personal perspective, it hurt to sustain attention on the story — particularly considering what wasn’t known. For instance, while the Nigerian government did little, the girls were likely being raped, experts said. That’s not easy to digest.

Other advocates and journalists I spoke to, however, generally agreed that people aren’t dumb or heartless when it comes to humanitarian matters. These experts said, instead, that global audiences unconsciously push away bad news as they try to lead their own peaceful lives.

“It’s not that people don’t care,” feminist writer and activist Soraya Chemaly told me. “It’s that caring is dangerous and might cost too much.”

She called it “a self-protective willful blindness.” Keeping painful truths at a distance “enables people to believe that they are immune from the risk, that their behavior, their traditions, their belief systems aren't implicated in harm.”

Echoing Chemaly, Steinem and others, Steve Hawkins, then the head of Amnesty International USA, told me he saw the challenge of making people care about atrocities “over there” as “one of broadening.”

“If we’re going to go deeper, and I think we can, then you have to connect the relevancy of human rights with what’s going on in people’s lives,” Hawkins said. “We have to find ways to bring human rights home.”

We need relevance.

Good journalism and strong activism, then, means helping people see — and keep seeing — that no one lives in isolation. When someone is hurting, as the flood and earthquake and conflict victims are right now, the world as a whole suffers. When governments fail to protect their citizens, collective vulnerability rises.

And when media noise about atrocities and other horrible news dies down, journalists and audiences alike are not only failing to help those in need, we are failing ourselves.

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