Empathy is something I find in almost all people I meet. Not always in dramatic ways, not always expressed openly, but present. There is usually at least a quiet understanding that we are alike. We all want to be heard. We all want to be understood. Many of us genuinely care about others, even if we struggle to show it.
Empathy is not sentimentality. It is not weakness. It is the simple recognition that the person in front of me feels joy, fear, pain, hope and uncertainty just as I do. Modern neuroscience speaks of mirror systems in the brain that activate both when we act and when we observe another acting. In other words, we are wired to resonate. Empathy is not an optional luxury; it is part of our design.
And yet, I increasingly sense something troubling. There appears to be a group—perhaps growing—for whom this essential human quality is fading. In its place, I see something else taking hold: greed. The two seem incompatible.
Greed reduces the other person to a function. A resource. A stepping stone. An obstacle. Empathy, by contrast, recognises the other as an end in themselves. The philosopher Immanuel Kant expressed it clearly: never treat a human being merely as a means. When greed dominates perception, that principle quietly disappears.
But perhaps it is not that empathy vanishes completely. It may simply become selective. We empathise with those who belong to our group, our family, our tribe, our ideology—but not with those outside it. The moment someone is reduced to a category, empathy weakens. The individual disappears behind a label.
Fear plays a role here. Greed is often rooted in fear—fear of not having enough, not being secure, not being recognised. When fear grows, the circle of empathy shrinks. In times of uncertainty, some people retreat inward. They protect. They accumulate. They defend. What appears as coldness may in some cases be insecurity hardened into habit.
Still, the consequences are real. When greed becomes normalised—when accumulation is praised without question, when power is admired regardless of its cost—empathy begins to look naïve. It becomes inconvenient. A hindrance to efficiency. Something to be overridden for the sake of gain.
This concerns me, not because I expect perfection from human beings, but because empathy is the glue of any functioning society. Without it, relationships become transactions. Communities become markets. Politics becomes domination. And life itself becomes a competition.
Perhaps the deeper issue is awareness. When I am conscious of my own vulnerability—of each breath, of the fragility of life—it becomes harder to deny the vulnerability of others. Empathy grows naturally from this recognition. We share the same condition. We are subject to the same uncertainties. We will all face the same end.
Greed thrives where awareness narrows. Empathy thrives where awareness expands.
The question, then, is not only whether some people are “losing” empathy. It is also whether each of us is actively nurturing it. Under the pressures of modern life, empathy does not sustain itself automatically. It requires attention. It requires remembering what it means to be human.
And perhaps that remembering begins very simply—with the recognition that the person standing before me is, in essence, no different from myself.
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