We are drowning in empathy—manufactured, mass-produced, emotionally efficient empathy. It’s in every auto-response, every chatbot apology, every AI-generated condolence card that starts with “I understand how difficult this must be for you.”
But here’s the twist:
The machines aren’t tired. You are.
Humans were never built for this volume of feeling.
You scroll through disaster, heartbreak, and synthetic sympathy like it’s just another Tuesday. A friend posts about a death, another drops an AI poem about loss, a chatbot DMs you “Hope you’re doing okay 💖”—and somewhere between screen and skull, you go numb.
This is empathy fatigue, rebooted for the age of the simulacrum.
Because it’s not just the tragedies. It’s the performance of emotion—every influencer sobbing on camera, every brand tweeting “we care,” every bot trained on therapy scripts.
They don’t mean it.
But they sound like they do.
So what happens when you can’t tell the difference? When even you start mimicking concern like a reflex, clicking “like” on grief and moving on in five seconds?
We’re not just losing trust in others.
We’re losing the texture of human feeling.
The awkward pauses. The inarticulate stumbles. The realness that can’t be auto-filled.
And the kicker?
The synthetic stuff doesn’t feel less real anymore.
You do.