I was born in September 1945 into a world of two billion souls. The war had just folded itself away – not cleanly, not without the long shadows that wars cast across generations, but enough that the songthrushes and nightingales were audible again.
A child growing up in that world might know, truly know — by name, by face, by the particular pitch of their laughter — perhaps three or four hundred people across an entire lifetime. The scale of moral obligation was, by necessity, local. You helped your neighbour because your neighbour was there in front of you. You were curious about the world because the world had not yet learned to shout and preen.
That ratio — one human animal, three hundred known souls, a village-sized horizon of moral responsibility — is roughly what humans were built for. Not by design. By the slow, unglamorous work of evolution across a hundred thousand years of small-group living. The band, the hamlet, the extended kin network: these were the containers in which empathy, generosity, curiosity and neighbourliness developed as functional traits because, in a world of that scale, they made sense. They bound communities together. They made survival more likely. They were, in the most literal sense, adaptively socialist.
We don’t live in that world anymore. We live in a world of eight billion, arriving at us continuously, each life with its own claim on our attention, its own horror, and its own demand that we respond, care, act, share, donate, outrage ourselves appropriately, and then scroll on. The word that keeps arriving when honest people in the West are asked how they feel is ‘weary’, not angry or afraid, though they are those too. The word is exhausted. And exhaustion is a different kind of signal. It’s not the cry of someone under attack. It’s the sound of a creature running a hundred thousand years past its design limits, drawing down reserves it didn’t even know were finite.
The neuroscientists call it empathy fatigue, which is clinical enough to obscure what it actually describes: the collapse of our capacity to feel the reality of other lives. The brain, which did not evolve for mediated mass suffering, does what any system does when overloaded — it shuts down non-essential processes. Empathy, being metabolically expensive and not immediately necessary for survival, is one of the first to go. What replaces it isn’t cruelty. What replaces it is a smooth affectlessness, a learned not-noticing, that looks from the outside remarkably like the selfishness it isn’t.
But the information environment is only the most recent intensifier of a process that began much earlier and more quietly. Affluence did its own work first. There’s a specific kind of human connection that only necessity produces — when your neighbour has what you need, and you have what your neighbour needs, and no institution stands between you to manage the exchange. In that world you learn the names of the children next door not because you are virtuous but because you are embedded in the community.
The postwar West dissolved that embeddedness with the best of intentions — the car, the detached house, the supermarket, and the welfare state that outsourced collective care to institutions and tax receipts. People didn’t become worse human beings. They became optional to each other. And optional relationships, maintained only when convenient, have a very different texture from obligatory ones. Lighter, freer, less fraught—in aggregate, far more lonely. What was lost was not comfort. Comfort discernibly increased. What was lost was the friction that produced meaning.
Scale, then, is the first story. Affluence is the second. The third runs deeper and takes longer to see because it has spent decades announcing itself as progress. The civilisation doing the exhausting — the one that colonised the imagination of the planet with its particular vision of the good life, its conviction that the future is a problem to be solved rather than a mystery to be inhabited — is in the late, strange stages of a decline it cannot quite bring itself to name.
Empires don’t end dramatically, or rarely do. They fray at the edges. The confidence leaks out slowly, and what fills the space where confidence was is not wisdom but anxiety — a free-floating ennui that attaches itself to whatever’s near: migrants, elites, the other party, the algorithm, the young, the old.
The neighbourliness of the postwar decades was not simply the product of community virtue. It was also the product of imperial confidence—the strong sense, shared even by people in modest circumstances, that the civilisation they inhabited was going somewhere worth going, that sacrifice and participation made sense because the project was coherent. Ibn Khaldun, writing in the fourteenth century, had a word for this cohesion: ‘asabiyya’ — the binding force of shared purpose that holds a civilisation together through difficulty. He also traced, with the patience of someone watching the very long game, what happens when it dissolves. The purpose goes first. Then the trust. Then the willingness to be inconvenienced by another person’s reality — the expensive, effortful, non-instrumental social goods that only make sense when you believe the project is worth sustaining. What remains, once asabiyya is gone, is factionalism and the hoarding of what’s left. It has the look of selfishness. It is closer to grief. And grief, if it lasts long enough, eventually asks a question: what comes next?
Something formed in the rubble that the builders never anticipated. The young are angrier than their grandparents were and far less parochial. Both things come from the same source: they inherited failure rather than promise, and failure, it turns out, has a wider radius than success ever did. They care, with a persistence that costs them energy, about people they will never meet — the child in the floodplain, the animal in the factory, the forest that has no voice in any parliament. Their empathy is not bounded by national myth or civilisational allegiance. It has a different shape. Less warm, perhaps. More abstract, more structural, more difficult to sustain in the body than the neighbourliness of the village was. Easier, therefore, to dismiss as performance.
It’s not performance. It’s what happens when a generation loses the imperial story, along with the accompanying confidence that made parochialism feel natural and reasonable – and, without a map, without a tradition to lean on, builds its moral attention at a scale the story never imagined.
Young people are building something in the ruins whose name we do not yet have. And what doesn’t have a label tends to be invisible to the civilisation that labelled everything that came before. This is not a reason for confidence. It’s a reason for something more durable than confidence: our attention. The willingness to look carefully at what’s actually forming, rather than mourning what’s gone.
I was born into a quiet world recovering from catastrophe. The world my grandchildren will die in will be louder and hotter and stranger than anything the twentieth century imagined. The exhaustion I feel — that many of us feel — is real, and it deserves to be talked about without shame. But exhaustion is not the end of the story. It’s the sensation of a creature running on the wrong fuel for a very long time, and the body, which is wiser than the civilisation it inhabits, demanding something different. Something very different.
We have not lost empathy. We have placed it inside structures that make it almost impossible to sustain, and then blamed ourselves for the predictable result. The only question that matters is whether enough people can feel their way toward structures that make it possible again. Not the neighbourliness of necessity, which can never be recovered. Something harder and perhaps more interesting: the neighbourliness of choice. Freely given. In full knowledge of what it costs.
That’s not optimism, exactly. But it isn’t pessimism either. It’s what a long life looks like when you refuse to resolve it too early.