Is it normal to feel completely indifferent to strangers' lives?

[AmusedTaupePlayer]

Hi all,
Bit of an odd one, but I’ve been thinking about this lately and wondering if anyone else relates.
I’ve noticed that unless someone is part of my life — family, close friends, maybe a few colleagues — I just don’t feel anything about what happens to them. Whether it’s good or bad. Someone winning the lottery, getting cancer, becoming homeless, whatever — I can understand it matters, but on a personal level, I feel nothing. Take homelessness — I get that it’s awful and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but emotionally, I don’t care. It doesn’t affect me. I don’t feel moved by it.
It’s not that I’m unkind or malicious. I just feel emotionally neutral about people I don’t know.
I suspect more people feel like this than let on, but whenever I’ve hinted at it, people react like I’m some sort of sociopath. So if it’s that common, why is it such a taboo to say out loud?
Is this just how emotional bandwidth works? Or is something off?
Genuinely curious — would love to know if others feel the same but just don’t talk about it.

That's why I asked if posters are conflating empathy with sympathy.

You remember Deanna Troi from Star Trek: the Next Generation?

Did you spot the word "some" in there @pikkumyy77 ? Or the fact I was explicitly talking about the difference between how I empathize as an ND person and how some (there it is again!) NT people get upset by the plight of others. You know, exactly the crux of what the OP was asking 🙄

I couldn’t imagine being like this.
I care probably too much about the plight of others.
I feel things and empathise deeply. Perhaps too much it’s not easy. Can’t even talk or read about anything to do with Gaza.

There’s a difference between being an empathetic person and being an empath. I think being empathetic means you are able to understand how someone else might feel as if you were in their shoes.

I don’t run for office because I don’t have what it takes (speaking in public, dealing with world leaders etc), honestly I wish I did.

It’s disappointing to see how people who do care about how others live a more difficult or cruel life are being pilloried (but then they are being criticised by people who don’t give a toss so no surprises there). If I had the money or nous I would love to change the world for the better. I have done small things in the past but I don’t have the resources (mental, physical or monetary) to make big changes.

I stopped reading the news quite a while back because traumatic events do affect me. Honestly I wish they didn’t.

A lot of people on this thread have expressed how they “care” about other people’s problems but that they don’t “feel” anything about them.

To me that is exactly the difference between the two - sympathy is knowing intellectually that something sad has happened and saying “I’m sorry that happened”, and empathy is actually feeling the sadness as if it happened to you.

ETA that was meant to be a reply to @tollypuddle’s question about empathy v sympathy.

Absolutely. I find it absolutely nauseating. I also find the OP's honesty refreshing.

'It's disappointing to see how people who do care about how others live a more difficult or cruel life are being pilloried'

Rather than being called a sociopath?

As I said in my first post, I care deeply about those I love. I'd go to the ends of the earth for my sister (actually, literally, have). I'd give DH a kidney (haven't had to.... yet). I've cried buckets in private when a young relative was going through a period of anxiety and depression, and spent hours listening to them try to articulate what was going on. But I don't have the same feelings for people I've never met.

@Tollypuddle How would you feel if one of your family (or yourself) had to rely on not just the kindness but the courage of a stranger to save your/their life. Would you be hoping it was someone who cared about the plight of a stranger?

Think about organ donations that go to strangers, is that all a bit dramatic and performative or is it reliant on someone who gives a toss about people they’ll likely never even meet?

Well obviously we don’t have the same depth of love for someone we don’t know as our own children and family, that's stating the ‘bleedin’ obvious’, no one is saying that. The point the OP made was that outside their family they don’t give a shit about anybody regardless of their plight.

But organ donation is nothing to do with empathy is it. I'm on the organ donor register. If my organs are donated I'll be dead. I won't care.

Many senior medical people are often described as sociopathic. So the surgeon who does the heart transplant, or who operates to remove a tumour could be the least empathic person on the planet. They're doing a job. The same as search and rescue pilots, firemen, policemen and women.

That doesn’t surprise me at all. While we might think we want our surgeons etc to be highly empathetic, those that were would probably find it absolutely crippling.

Surgeons score more highly on psychopathic scale than the general population. Isolation of affect from cognition is a very useful trait, as is high excitation threshold (e.g. war reporters). No personality style (narcissistic, psychopathic/antisocial, histionic and so on) is good/bad. The problem is when someone's psychology passes over to clinical/disorder level. From what I can see on Dr. Google, "an empath" is an excessively sensitive person (sorry never watched Star Trek, so no idea who Deanna Troi is, maybe the opposite of Spock). It sounds disordered, like it causes the individual and people around them problems.

Right—its not like the choices are sociopath or narcissistic grief thief. There are wide swathes of possibilities between these two. Culture and convention play an enormous part in fostering or shutting down empathic response to someone else's situation or an out and out request for help. Its not surprising to me that this discussion is going the way this is going because English culture is extremely self consciously phlegmatic and averse to the “indulgence” of public displays of anything (except football hooliganism) and there is a lot of classism and sexism bound up in that as well.

Well you’re doing better than me because I don’t have them for people I’m close to either. Like if my partner’s mum died or something and he was crying I would intellectually know it was sad and support him but I wouldn’t be feeling upset myself.

And that's OK.

Also maybe how you were brought up. Lack of caring about others often (but not always) starts at home. There have been many studies about lack of empathy because most heinous crimes are committed by people who lack it.

This is the thing you don’t seem to understand though, you can care about stuff without feeling any emotion. I’m on the organ donor register and I’ve stopped to help strangers several times. I volunteer with homeless and animal charities and regularly donate to more. I just don’t feel actual emotions about it, it’s more of a theoretical understanding that those things are bad.

This! Organ donation just makes logical sense because who cares what happens to my body after I’m dead? Not me. I’m not on the register out of a bleeding heart desire to save a life, just because I don’t think there’s a good reason not to be. I actually do think people who opt out are dicks though.

This is different from what the OP expressed. Following OPs logic, she would be on the organ donor list because she would want it to be available should SHE need it. In OPs world, everything is referenced back to OP.

The Bulger case still fills me with emotion after all these years. The Holocaust still fills me with emotion. Baby P fills me with emotion. I could go on. Those things will still affect me if I lived another hundred years. I don’t want to be the sort of person who doesn’t feel actual deep emotion about these things. But as they like to say on MN, you do you.

Cool. It’s not a choice though, some people feel it, some people don’t. I actually don’t think either state is better or worse, just different. So if I, with my lack of empathy, can accept other people feel more emotion about stuff than me, why can’t that acceptance go the other way?

Ok fair point that is different.

I think the reason I care quite a lot about a lot of social issues is that a fair few of them I have some degree of personal experience of. Outside of that I probably do feel a bit blank about some things. At the other end if something contrasts a lot with my (privileged) life I will feel empathy.

I think maybe what you are describing is apathy.