A Perfect Metaphor of Modern Human Apathy

A skateboarder went to France during the riots. Not to document the uprising, not to support the protesters and definitely not to understand why people were in the streets fighting for their rights. He went to make a skate video. He skated through burning streets and clashing crowds, filmed himself doing tricks against a backdrop of civil unrest, and posted it for likes. He laughs as he runs from street to street trying to avoid the violence. The apathy is so obvious and ugly it hurts me to watch it. This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a pattern. And the psychology behind it explains something much larger than one skateboarder with a camera. **The empathy collapse is measurable.** In 2010, researcher Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan published a meta-analysis of 72 studies spanning 30 years, covering nearly 14,000 American college students. Her finding was stunning and precise. Empathy among young adults had dropped 40 percent compared to their counterparts in the 1980s and 1990s. The largest decline occurred after the year 2000, exactly when social media began reorganizing how young people relate to each other and the world. Konrath measured two specific dimensions. The first was empathic concern, the ability to feel tenderness and concern for people less fortunate. The second was perspective-taking, the ability to imagine how things look from someone else’s point of view. Both declined sharply. Students were less likely to agree with statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.” That 40 percent decline isn’t abstract. It’s the difference between seeing a riot and feeling something about the people in it, and seeing a riot and thinking about what it would look like as a background for your skate video. The empathy that would make someone stop and say “this isn’t about me” has been measurably and empirically reduced. And the generation most affected is the one that grew up performing their lives for cameras. **How social media turned empathy into a liability.** Empathy requires one specific cognitive act: the temporary suspension of self-focus. To feel what someone else is feeling, you have to stop thinking about yourself long enough to think about them. Social media trains the exact opposite. Every platform is built around one question: how do I present myself? What do I post? How will this make me look? How many people will engage with my content? Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, spent two decades tracking this shift. Her research, conducted with Keith Campbell and published across multiple studies, showed that narcissistic traits among college students rose steadily from the late 1970s through the 2000s. Two-thirds of contemporary students scored above the narcissistic average of students tested in the early 1980s. Twenge and Campbell published their findings in the book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, arguing that American culture had created a self-reinforcing system where self-promotion was rewarded, self-absorption was normalized, and self-focus became the default mode of existence. Social media didn’t create narcissism. But it created an economy that runs on it. Every like, every comment, every share, every follow is a unit of attention converted into a unit of perceived self-worth. And the platforms are designed, deliberately and with billions of dollars of engineering, to make that feedback loop as addictive as possible. Variable reinforcement, the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines addictive, powers every notification. You don’t know when the next burst of attention is coming, so you keep posting. You keep performing. And the performance becomes the only thing that feels real. This is how a person skates through a riot and feels nothing about the riot. The riot is not a human event to him. It is content. It is background. It is production value. And the only feelings that register are the ones connected to the performance: will this get views? Will this go viral? Will this make me famous? **Ethical fading: when the moral dimension disappears.** In 2004, researcher Ann Tenbrunsel at the University of Notre Dame published a paper that identified a cognitive process she called ethical fading. Tenbrunsel found that people frequently make unethical decisions not because they consciously decide to do something wrong, but because the ethical dimension of the decision literally disappears from their awareness. When people focus heavily on some other aspect of a decision, such as winning, profit, or in this case, content, they stop seeing the ethical issue at all. Ethical fading is different from moral disengagement, where people actively restructure reality to justify harmful behavior. In ethical fading, the person doesn’t even register that there’s a moral question on the table. The ethics don’t get overruled. They get erased. This is what’s happening when someone skates through a riot and genuinely does not understand why people are upset. He isn’t suppressing guilt. He isn’t justifying his behavior by weighing it against some higher purpose. The ethical dimension of the situation, that real people around him are fighting for their lives and dignity, has faded completely from his awareness. All that remains is the content frame: will this clip work? Is the lighting good? Is the backdrop dramatic enough? Social media accelerates ethical fading because it trains people to see every moment through the content frame first. The question is never “what is happening here?” The question is “how can I use what’s happening here?” And once the content frame becomes the default, the ethical frame doesn’t stand a chance. It fades before it ever forms. **The death toll of the content frame.** This isn’t just about tone-deafness. People are dying for content. A study published in 2018 in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care documented over 250 verified deaths from selfie-related incidents between 2011 and 2017, with an average age of 23. People falling from cliffs, drowning, being struck by trains, all while trying to get the shot. The researchers noted that the desire to be perceived as cool and the pursuit of likes and comments were primary motivators. But the selfie deaths are only the most literal version of the problem. The deeper damage is what happens when the content frame colonizes every human experience. Funerals become photo opportunities. Natural disasters become backdrops. Riots become aesthetic. Other people’s suffering becomes your production value. And the person doing it often has no awareness that anything is wrong, because ethical fading has done its work so completely that the moral dimension of the moment never enters their consciousness. The skateboarder in France is a perfect case study. He didn’t go to the riot and decide to ignore the suffering. He went to the riot and never perceived the suffering in the first place. In his world, the riot was always just a setting. The people were always just extras. And the star of the show was always him. **How we got here.** The question isn’t really why this one skateboarder did this. The question is how we built a world where this behavior makes sense to anyone. **The answer is that we built an economy around attention and taught an entire generation that attention is the most valuable thing they can possess.** We built platforms that reward self-promotion and penalize nuance. We built algorithms that amplify the most extreme, most provocative, most boundary-crossing content because that content generates the most engagement. And then we handed those platforms to people whose empathy had already been declining for decades and whose narcissistic traits had already been rising for just as long. The skateboarder is not an aberration. He is the system working exactly as designed. He is what you get w… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe