EMPATHY? COMPASSION? WHAT´S THAT?

Bill Gates recently accused Elon Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children”, not with malice, but with indifference. Musk’s decision, through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to effectively shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development has halted life-saving programs. Food is rotting. Vaccines are sitting in warehouses. Children are being born with HIV in places where it could’ve been prevented.

Gates, in contrast, has announced he will give away almost all of his fortune and shut down the Gates Foundation by 2045, aiming to double its impact in the next two decades. He’s not perfect,  no one is, but his actions show an awareness of human suffering, and a will to respond to it.

But the point isn’t Gates vs. Musk.

The point is what this moment says about us, all of us.

We are supposed to feel empathy. Most people do. But the question is: Is it enough?

The suffering we see in the world is not just the result of evil, it’s the result of billions of small turnings-away. A shrug. A rationalization. A belief that someone else will handle it.

There was a time when kindness, cooperation, and deep empathy were our only survival tools. When early humans faced extinction-level threats like famine, predators, the cold, the night. It wasn’t strength or speed that saved us. It was connection. Sharing food. Taking care of the sick. Protecting children who weren’t our own. Sitting by the fire and telling stories that taught compassion, identity, community and belonging.

Empathy wasn’t a luxury, it was a lifeline.

So what happened?

I don't think that empathy just disappeared. But I do believe that scale broke it. In small groups, empathy is direct. It's a face, a name, a cry you can hear. But in a world of billions, endless screens, and constant noise, we’ve grown numb. We compartmentalize. We intellectualize. The face becomes a statistic. And once empathy is abstracted… it loses its urgency. Get it? There is no urgency anymore. There are other more common modern things that stress us out. 

We evolved to form tribes, but now we live in big cities. Tokyo: 30 million people. NY: 9 million. Bogotá: 8 million. So that disconnect in a sea of people did it. And empathy, without reinforcement, gets drowned out by ambition, distraction, and the myth of self-sufficiency. Something which our capitalistic societies don't want to stop demanding from each one of us. 

What is sad is that the capacity to turn away from other people is part of us too.

That’s what makes this so painful. Our humanity isn’t absent, it’s just not strong enough. Not yet. Not focused. Not embodied in systems, choices, and courage that match the scale of what the world needs.

We don’t need to be saints. But maybe we need to stop telling ourselves that feeling bad is the same as doing good.

Kindness is in us. The question is whether we use it like a sword or let it flicker out, quietly, in the name of convenience.

Thanks for reading. Abrazos.

Diego Rojas