Over the Christmas break, I had a conversation that’s stayed with me. It was with a close family member—someone kind, thoughtful, and deeply honest. We were talking about generosity and global suffering, and he said something that shave me pause to reflect:
“I just can’t bring myself to care much about people I don’t know. Not really. Not beyond Australia. Not even really beyond my family and mates.”
There was no shame in it. No defense. Just clarity. And honestly? I respected it. I think most people, if pressed, would admit something similar. Even I, despite my giving, my values, my public commitments, am not immune to this narrowing of the heart. If I truly believed every life was equal, wouldn’t I give 90% of my income and live in the barest, cheapest way that kept me alive and employable?
This is the tension Peter Singer acknowledges in The Most Good You Can Do (book link). That the logic of effective altruism is clear and compelling, but the follow-through is… hard. Even Singer himself, famously rational and committed, gives far more than most but far less than that ideal.
So why is it hard? Why don’t we naturally care about strangers, let alone people on distant continents?
The Biology of Empathy: Evolved to Care Close
Humans evolved in small kin-based groups. Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists widely agree that our sense of empathy and fairness evolved to support in-group cooperation, not universal compassion (Tomasello, 2009).
Dunbar’s number, roughly 150, is often cited as the upper limit of people we can genuinely know and care about at any one time (Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language – Dunbar, 1998).
Neurological studies show that we literally feel more when someone close to us suffers. Studies have showed that people showed stronger empathic brain activity when told a painful stimulus was applied to someone of the same race or nationality. This is an uncomfortable finding, but a consistent one across similar research.
It doesn’t mean we’re bad. It means we’re human. We evolved this way.
Culture Builds the Boundaries
But biology isn’t the whole story. Culture, and circumstance, draw the lines of our moral universe.
Historically, empathy was often extended only within the tribe. Forager societies, while cooperative internally, often warred with outsiders. Even in highly egalitarian cultures like the Hadza or San, group identity mattered immensely (Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 1999). Anthropologist Christopher Boehm describes how moral systems in early societies promoted equality within the group but not beyond it.
As societies grew and centralized, religions and nation-states began telling us who counts. Sometimes that circle widened, at least in theory with Christianity’s “love thy neighbor” or Buddhism’s compassion for all sentient beings. Other times it narrowed, excluding and putting to death heretics, foreigners, or the poor.
Modern nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism have all, in different ways, reinforced artificial divisions. Racism and xenophobia aren’t inevitable. They are taught, often to protect economic or political interests (Fields & Fields, Racecraft, 2014).
The Modern Condition: Too Much, Too Fast
And then there’s modern life. Most of us are overwhelmed. Even without bad news.
There’s a term from psychology—“compassion collapse”—which describes how people tend to care less as the number of victims increases. The death of one child moves us more than the death of one thousand. Paul Slovic, a psychologist who has studied this phenomenon, calls it the “arithmetic of compassion” (Slovic, 2015)—and it doesn’t add up.
We’re bombarded daily with suffering we feel powerless to affect. Climate disaster. War. Injustice. We scroll past it all, not because we’re heartless, but because we’re saturated. Overloaded. Emotionally numb.
Add to this the increasing demands on our time and attention that are modern, digitally connected life, and you can see why many people, maybe most, retreat to their smaller empathy circles.
What Can We Do?
This isn’t about guilt. But if you feel it, that’s okay – we evolved with guilt as a motivator. We have a choice. Do we ignore it, or do we probe it?
We can’t fully overcome biology or culture. But we can stretch. Bit by bit. Conversation by conversation. Story by story.
That’s one of the reasons we’re embarking on the Living More with Less journey. It’s not just about emissions or economics, it’s about empathy. About helping us and especially our children to truly feel connected with people beyond their own small, safe world. About helping others imagine doing the same.
Because empathy grows through exposure, connection, and intentional practice. When we meet people whose material lives are vastly different to ours, yet full of joy and struggle, emotions we can relate to, a feeling grows. When we hear their stories, or give to them, or live with less so others can have more, the feeling grows.
It grew in me. Many years ago in Cambodia, where a family we had only recently met, with barely enough rice to make it through the season, insisted on sharing one of their few chickens to feed us. In Vietnam, where the children in their bright shorts and bare feet took great delight in running after Emelie and I in the rain, helping us up the hill. It grew in me here, in Brisbane too, where I have worked with people who came to Australia with so little and now have it all.
And I’ve felt the pull of retreat, too. The creeping desire to close the circle, to put my family first, my friends first, me first and to just to clamp my eyes shut out the rest of the world. That’s okay, its natural. But I want to resist it.
I want to help my kids resist it. I want to help us all resist it.
The Journey Ahead
This matters more now than perhaps at any other time in living memory. We’re witnessing a rising tide of nationalism, isolationism, and economic division, driven by fear and uncertainty, often inflamed by political opportunism and the forces of our broken economic model. These forces thrive on narrowing empathy, on drawing hard lines between “us” and “them.” Historically, when such narratives dominate, they lead not to strength but to tragedy, the very worst chapters of human history have been written in the ink of othering.
At the same time, we face a biological mismatch. Our instincts, shaped over millennia in small, mobile bands, served us when there was always another valley, another water source, more space to roam. But now, we live in a crowded, interdependent world with finite resources and unprecedented global reach. Our biological evolution simply hasn’t caught up with our cultural and technological revolutions. If we continue to follow our default instincts to hoard, to fear, to close ranks, we won’t find solutions. We’ll accelerate collapse and suffering.
So we must cultivate what evolution didn’t fully prepare us for: expansive empathy. Intentional, learned compassion. Not just for our families or our communities, but for strangers, for future generations, and for those whose lives are radically different from our own.
This is why our journey matters. Why your next choice matters. Not because you have to save the world alone, but because you can help shape it. Every act of generosity, every story shared, every discomfort faced helps tilt the balance.
So ask yourself: How far can you expand your empathy envelope? What small, meaningful change could you make today, this week, this year that would improve the life of a stranger?
Because the future we build together won’t be born out of guilt or fear or ignorance. It will be born out of courage, out of connection, and out of care.