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.

It’s nothing to do with shutting it off as a defence mechanism in my case. It’s not an active choice, it’s just not something I feel. I think I’ve always been like this. I often think I’d be a great therapist because I could sit and listen to someone talking about horrific traumatic things for hours on end. Of course I’d think “that’s awful, that’s unjust, this person has been through a lot” but it wouldn’t make me feel any actual emotional pain myself.

I also find my empathy very selective. For example, I’ve had severe mental health issues in the past but had years of therapy and medication, I’ve never not worked, I feel it’s my responsibility to help myself. I’ve also got ADHD. If someone with the exact same diagnoses says they’re, for example, unable to work or do certain things I don’t find myself empathising. My immediate thought is “well I’ve done it so you should too”.

yeah i been told that, oh well - those who tell me that arent in my life, so it dont matter

easy - i didnt cause the issue, i cant stop it, i have enough in my life that takes my emotional energy
The charity ads are designed to make you feel bad- i just see them as an ad, nothing more
I dont watch the news, by choice
Too much drama, too much BS, not worth my time

I get it. I remember when Princess Diana died and everyone was "emoting" all over the place and I felt sorry for the boys but it didn't upset me on a personal level. I went to the Mall to mingle with the crowds to see if I could understand it, but it felt like being in another country where everything was foreign to me.

Today DH is upset that Diogo Jota has died. (He's not a Liverpool fan.) He came in "Have you seen the news?" I thought China had invaded Taiwan or something else huge but no, a footballer has died in a car crash. He (Jota) just got married two or three weeks ago. I said, on the bright side, that makes it easier for her re. inheritance. DH said that was heartless.

Hi OP,

I think the disconnect you describe feeling is pretty common. The difference may be that - being autistic - you are more transparent with your feelings/motivations.

Im autistic too but I go the other way and tend to absorb and invest in others emotions in a way that’s really impractical. So if the news is on, I get really fixated on particular cases where I can’t practically help. So I have to consciously detach.

What I perceive with neurotypical people is often their actions are intrinsically tied into maintaining social capital. Not in a manipulative way - it’s unconscious. So, for example, I know a lot of neurotypical people who don’t regular give to charity but they’d automatically sponsor a colleague to maintain their social capital. Whereas I choose the charities I want to support via gift aid and get a bit aggrieved when asked in shops to donate or sponsor random activities for charities I don’t really care about. I just don’t think autistic people are as tuned into maintaining social capital as NT people. We can mask - but it’s conscious and we’d feel a bit hypocritical. Whereas for NT people preserving social capital is subconscious and deeply ingrained. If you ask them “Why are you sponsoring Karen’s run?” they will say it’s because they care about the charity. And they are being totally honest. It would just never cross their minds to set up a standing order to the charity - it’s a different (less black & white) definition of “care”.

So I think your feelings are normally. It’s just the way you present them (ie. More honestly).

who cares?

I had another thought: you could be depressed

i am not depressed

Me too. I very much relate to everything you wrote

I can relate to everything you say. I had to take a month off school when my pet died but didn't feel the same way when a family member passed away. I always wondered why , now I am diagnosed with autism

It’s a psychopathic trait to feel no empathy

Don't trot out buzzwords that you have no understanding of. It just makes you look stupid.

Have you actually witnessed a fatal accident like this, or are you just imagining how you would feel? The reality might surprise you.

I sometimes think that I’m like this. But I play tennis in the park where a little girl was killed by a tree last week, and when I went there yesterday and saw the floral tributes I was unexpectedly overcome by emotion and did find myself in tears. I do understand what you mean though.

So- hypothetical situations, your manager has to pick one of their team of 3 to fire, chooses you, because it doesn’t matter to them really. Should they care?
your sister is long term sick and needs benefits but the govt is all full of people like you who said fuck it cancel them all. So she slowly starves to death. Fine by you?
your house is a poorly built fire danger and burns down, as there are no standards for building fire safe. (Or worse- you lived in grenfell towers). Thats cool though because why the fuck would faceless bureacrats put time and effort into fire safety regs for buildings they don’t live in when they could be doing something fun?

essentially large chunks of your quality of life exists because people have cared, in the abstract, about other people. You’re taking it like you think you deserve it, while you’d have personally let the Irish famine happen, or booted a leaky boat full of women and children refugees back into deep water to drown. What exactly do you want us to say to you?

Hi @AmusedTaupePlayer I think I get what you’re describing.

One time when I really feel like this myself, is when I see posts on here whereby someone says something like ‘is there an update, OP? I’ve been thinking about you all night and am worried’

Or ‘I’m typing through tears thinking about this’. Or similar. I can’t even imagine myself into the position of feeling like this over a stranger on the Internet, particularly when you’ve got no evidence that it’s true.

@Codlingmoths and whoever mentioned WWII - that's not at all the same. I feel passionately about social justice etc. I have made efforts, including at personal cost to myself, to defend the victimised etc. I can't go into details because it would be outing, but I have very much done my bit, and more than most. But I still can't get upset about the death of a random stranger.

Oh I can't stand that performative bullshit. That's just being a straight up grief vulture imo.

I think it depends who or what you think is “nothing to do with you”. Actually people in sweatshops who sewed the seams of the clothes you’re wearing right now are something to do with you, but we don’t look down and look at the stitches and think of the hands that made them. It would be pretty uncomfortable to think clearly about where our discarded clothes end up, whose water and air our lifestyles are messing up, how much of our money goes towards arms used against civilian populations. So we shut off that kind of imagination and feeling of connection. Neoliberal capitalism is dependent on us each feeling like an individual commodity (that can be improved or perfected with the right goods or services!) rather than like an interconnected group. So maybe it is more surprising when people do still remember and prioritize the connections between us.

I had figured as much. My adult DC with autism described his lack of wider engagement in very similar terms. My mega-empathetic adult DC (ADHD) speaks in nearly the opposite and feels connected to everyone.

AutDC is incredibly generous and supportive towards anyone within his circle of family/close friends - really quite remarkably so - but once outside that boundary just doesn’t care. The line between Us and Them is very stark.
It can be very jarring to see someone so empathetic and caring in one circumstance and utterly callous in others.

I don’t think all of those situations are comparable because you don’t have to feel emotions about something to recognise that people deserve basic rights like a safe home. Building safety laws and sickness benefits are about upholding rights, they weren’t created because someone was crying about the plight of another person, but because we recognise intellectually that these things are necessary for a functioning society. You can care on a theoretical/intellectual level without actually feeling emotion about it.

a manager firing someone, well, it had to be someone, so why would they care more about one employee more than the others?

I feel quite deeply for people, especially children and animals, that are suffering. Personally I wouldn’t want to change that. I don’t want to be someone who only cares about how something affects me, even if I can’t do a thing about it. My ex is most likely a sociopath and I have no desire to be anything like him.

Yeah, I care — in the abstract — because I don’t want shit to happen to me. And that’s the point. I want a world where the rules work, where protections exist, and where people aren’t just left to rot. Not because I’m overflowing with compassion, but because one day it could be me.
I support welfare not because I’m soft-hearted, but because illness or redundancy could hit anyone — including me. I want decent housing regs not because I lose sleep over strangers, but because I don’t want to burn to death in a tower some greedy developer cut corners on. I want the NHS to work because I might need it — not because I care about everyone else’s grandma.
Caring in the abstract is about self-interest scaled up. It’s the recognition that even if I’m fine now, I won’t always be. That the systems I help build — or destroy — will catch up to me eventually.
So no, I don’t need to love every individual. I just need to care enough about the kind of society I want to live in. One with safety nets, rules, fairness — because without that, it’s just chaos and luck. And eventually, your luck runs out.

Beautifully expressed.

Hmm. Do I feel it? Sometimes. I find I can imagine the lives of others reasonably well, but does that extend to actual mirroring of emotion? I don't think so. If I read a thread about someone on here who has been abused by a partner, I don't feel the abuse. But I feel anger to some degree, and I want to help if I can (even if it's just words).

I tell you what I don't get, and that is excessive, dramatic sentimentality, the sort that social media is full of. Very performative and ever so slightly unhinged IMO.

Empathy? It's part of being human. We have a welfare state so that, ideally, people don't starve on the streets. Charities are set up to provide support and necessary items like food boxes. People volunteer their time to help those in need such as the RNLI, the Samaritans and St John's ambulance service. We have vocations such as nursing and social work where people solely help strangers.

If everyone was indifferent, it would be horrific.