Venting Humans have short term memory

[ghost-shock]

I see posts and videos online saying that people have become less kind and empathetic.

Do they forget how bad bullying was in the 90s and 2000s? At school, we were constantly reminded of how many girls self-harmed and developed ctb'ed due to bullying, body shaming etc

Do people forget about apartheid? Segregation? People were literally told they couldn't walk on certain parts of the street because of their ethnicity.

How have we "lost" empathy when humans never had much to begin with? If anything, society has become more open-minded. Of course, horrible people still exist (I experience them a lot), but historically, the way humans have treated each other especially people of colour, women, and LGBTQ+ people has never been good.

And then some people have the cheek to blame AI. Was it AI that beat and enslaved people? Was it AI that murdered and raped women? What has AI done that is worse than what humans have done in the past and continue to do?

It feels like people have short-term memory and forget how horrific humans were to one another, putting rose-tinted glasses on the past. It's similar to how the elderly complain about younger generations while reminiscing about "how great things used to be." Every generation does this. We're even seeing it now, with millennials complaining about Gen Z and Gen Alpha and romanticising the "great" 90s, while boomers complain about millennials and reminisce about how great the 70s were.

I see this phenomenon a lot, and I wonder what causes it. I just find the human mind so strange.

 

[finaldestination22]

Agree that's why the most important thing for a human is his inner circle and family. The wider world has always been mostly cruel but having good friends and family makes a human ignore that mostly and look at the good side of life.

Also why almost everyone here looking to CTB is because of his personal life, bad friends or not friends at all, trauma or no family support at all. The state of the world affects someone much less then his personal life

 

[metfan647]

I just remember my dad (born in 1938) always repeating "a boy should be seen but not heard".

Being a child, no being anyone, in past times was infinitely worse. The gratuitous violence one could be subject to by a close family member under the pretence of discipline was quite horrific to the modern standard. I mean, when did wellbeing conversations even start becoming a thing? Discussions on mental health? Certainly not to a great degree in my childhood years.

We've definitely come a long way in terms of the levels of kindness and empathy your average person understands they ought to show. All this could easily be undone though. When you have an explicitly unkind rhetoric from world leaders of western democracies who are, in our limited view, 'the good guys' and celebrities with God-like status espousing hateful views, it will distort people's psyche.

I could be totally wrong.

 

[witchbimbo]

It drives me bonkers tbh. Like yeah, every generation has unique circumstances and challenges but the idea that people willfully ignoring their own alleged morals and lacking empathy because they'd rather demonize other than look at themselves is somehow new is just absurd.

I started noticing this in my early teens in the early 00s, when half the adults around reacted to certain world events by actively picking on literal children for being "too sensitive" just because they didn't want to deal with their own emotions.

It's so infuriating seeing fellow millennials do the same generational war bs we swore we'd never do. It's like they've forgotten what that was like. They blamed the failing economy on millennials when we were just becoming adults ffs! And they're calling children (gen alpha) dumb already like they aren't literally children with plenty of potential to teach them whatever they're in need of learning.

I understand discussing problems, but the constant exaggeration about people so young is infuriating!

And you're so right about historical examples of low empathy en masse. We're seeing it more because the world os online putting it out there in comments on all the major sites, but it's absolutely not new.

If anything, an increase in unempatheic behavior would be the natural outcome for how well they enforced those 0 tolerance bullying initiatives that seemed to exclusively not tolerate kids that were targets of bullying anyways so idk what anyone expects the 21st century to look like if not this tbh

I just remember my dad (born in 1938) always repeating "a boy should be seen but not heard".

Being a child, no being anyone, in past times was infinitely worse. The gratuitous violence one could be subject to by a close family member under the pretence of discipline was quite horrific to the modern standard. I mean, when did wellbeing conversations even start becoming a thing? Discussions on mental health? Certainly not to a great degree in my childhood years.

We've definitely come a long way in terms of the levels of kindness and empathy your average person understands they ought to show. All this could easily be undone though. When you have an explicitly unkind rhetoric from world leaders of western democracies who are, in our limited view, 'the good guys' and celebrities with God-like status espousing hateful views, it will distort people's psyche.

I could be totally wrong.

Absolutely solid point!

It's also worth noting that childhood as a concept in our culture was invented mid-century. Children were literally property when your dad was born and people didn't want to get too attached to young children especially because who knew which ine would actually grow up?

That alone is proof of your point that we've come a long way in terms of empathy. Perhaps that's why people are so shocked by the lack of it being shown from said people with influence like celebrities and world leaders. We should be able to expect more based on the trajectory of past progress.

Continued progress requires fighting for it.