“Scientists announced today that they have discovered a cure for apathy. However, they claim no one has shown the slightest interest in it.”— George Carlin
I’ve noticed the rise of apathy for at least two decades, nearly a third of my life. In the oughts it was subtle, but obviously when things got politicized into the Tea Party and the rise of Trump, apathy went on a multi digit uptick.
It shouldn’t be a surprise when books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck was popular in the mid teens. When I bought the book for the first time just last year, while I was in Portsmouth, I wanted to get sick and vomit because I couldn’t believe i would be reading a book that despite having “fuck” inside the book where if I had a shot I’d be wasted by the first couple of pages, but just the cavalier nature of not having any sympathy of empathy as it’s being legitimized is the step into the wrong direction.
The apathy rose as Covid came to be. People were highly skeptical of the science, and didn’t care if they were super-spreaders or if people died. If someone died from Covid, it was written off as well shit happens. But a couple years later, as Roe was overturned, those “shit happens” people were all in glory that the right to live at all costs was going to be reversed. It’s not the baby’s fault for being created – even if it was caused by incest!
It shouldn’t be a surprise to see that people have no sympathy for preventing novel viruses to spread or understand that conception is not a tramp wanting to be a tramp. People do not care about history, or how something worse than a common cold can cause long term issues (such as long haul Covid) or the complex nature of pregnancy, especially when lawmakers are mostly men who forgot their vague “Female Anatomy” lessons in school many decades before.
CEOs and business leaders are completely removed from the products or services they produce. They care about pocketing “profits” and feel entitled to make millions on performance, not on actual quality. We put them up on a pedestal and respect them with their rizz. But even in non for profits, CEOs are put on so much sympathy when they lack the empathy.
Managerial people are the faces that most rank and file people will see, but managerial people have to ensure resources are properly allocated to the perceived better groups of people. This leads into caveman styled tribes, us versus them, leaving more division than unity, and will often preach unity through “team building” events to get the employees to buy into the manager’s delusion. Managerial types lack the understanding of what goes on behind creating a product or service, because they are fulfilling the need of a vice president or a CEO’s demands.