Everyone’s a Bitch and Nobody Cares.

On the cultural poverty of empathy, the performance of not caring, and why emotional indifference is not the same thing as strength.

19th September, 2026.

When I moved to the United States at seventeen, everyone warned me about culture shock.

I waited for it.

I had attended international schools for most of my life. American films, music, language, humor, fashion, social customs—none of it felt particularly foreign to me. I knew what a prom was before I ever lived near one. I understood the references. I spoke the language. The West had been arriving through my television, classrooms, friendships, and internet connection for years before I ever arrived here myself.

So no, the culture shock wasn’t cultural.

It was emotional.

I wasn’t prepared for how expensive care seemed to be.

Not kindness exactly. There is plenty of politeness. People hold doors. They say have a good one. They apologize when they bump into you at the grocery store. There is an entire vocabulary of pleasantness available to us.

But politeness and empathy are distant relatives, and I think we’ve been confusing them for years.

Empathy requires inconvenience.

It asks you to temporarily vacate the very comfortable headquarters of yourself and consider the gravity of someone else’s situation—not according to how serious it appears from where you’re standing, but according to what it might weigh from where they are.

That distinction seems increasingly difficult for us.

Somewhere along the way, we developed an enormous cultural appetite for boundaries and a remarkably small one for responsibility toward one another. We learned phrases like protect your peace, not my problem, I don’t owe anyone anything, cut them off. Occasionally, those ideas are necessary. Boundaries can save people from genuinely destructive relationships.

But good medicine becomes poison at the wrong dosage.

We have become so fluent in protecting ourselves that sometimes I wonder whether we’ve forgotten how to extend ourselves.

Everything is a boundary. Everything is emotional labor. Everything potentially threatens our peace. Another person’s grief is “too much.” Their difficulty is “draining.” Their need for reassurance becomes “neediness.” We have acquired increasingly sophisticated psychological vocabulary and somehow used some of it to become less psychologically generous.

We can diagnose a dynamic in thirty seconds and still fail to ask, Are you okay?

And I find that contradiction fascinating.

Because everybody has a reason for becoming difficult.

Everybody has a childhood, an abandonment, an insecurity, a betrayal, a year they don’t like discussing. Everyone has had something happen to them that could theoretically explain why tenderness became inconvenient.

But explanation and absolution are not synonyms.

At some point, you become an adult.

And adulthood, to me, has to include taking responsibility for the emotional atmosphere you create around other people.

I don’t care whether you’re a man or a woman. I don’t care whether your childhood was emotionally expressive or emotionally constipated. There comes a point when this is just how I am becomes an embarrassingly inadequate philosophy.

You have to teach yourself to consider other people.

You have to learn how to read a room you are not the center of.

You have to develop the emotional range to understand that something can seem trivial to you and catastrophic to somebody else—and that your inability to feel its weight does not make it weightless.

That is empathy.

Not agreement. Not self-sacrifice. Not allowing everybody unlimited access to you.

Perspective.

The willingness to acknowledge that your nervous system is not the universal measuring instrument for human pain.

For a long time, I wondered whether I was imagining the absence of that kind of care. Maybe it was because I was international. Maybe people had roots here that I didn’t have. Families nearby. Childhood friends. Communities formed long before I arrived. Maybe I was simply noticing the difference between entering a society and being raised inside one.

There is probably some truth in that.

But after years of living here, I think what disturbed me was larger than whether people cared about me.

It was watching how casually we can fail to care about one another.

And perhaps “care” sounds too sentimental for a serious conversation, which may itself be part of the problem. We tend to treat emotion as the decorative part of being human—as though underneath all the feelings there is a more rational, more legitimate creature running the operation.

There isn’t.

The heart may anatomically be a muscular pump, but human beings are not plumbing systems with résumés.

Our experiences are being continuously interpreted through brains and bodies shaped by memory, attachment, stress, perception, hormones, expectation, fear, reward, and social connection. We don’t merely have emotional lives somewhere off to the side. Our emotional and physiological lives are entangled.

Which makes our collective worship of not caring particularly strange.

We praise detachment as though indifference were evidence of superior emotional regulation. We admire the person who “doesn’t give a fuck.” We confuse being unaffected with being evolved.

But numbness is not necessarily maturity.

Sometimes maturity is being affected and behaving thoughtfully anyway.

Sometimes strength is allowing another person’s reality to penetrate your own without immediately making it about yourself.

Sometimes having a soft heart requires considerably more backbone than having a hard one.

And perhaps this is what I have struggled to articulate since I was seventeen.

I didn’t arrive in America shocked by individualism. I understood independence. In many ways, I admire it. There is something extraordinary about being taught to construct a life of your own.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the possibility that independence, taken to its logical extreme, could become isolation with excellent branding.

A society cannot survive exclusively on self-sufficiency.

At some point, someone has to bring the soup.

Someone has to notice the silence.

Someone has to make the inconvenient phone call, sit in the uncomfortable room, remember what happened to you, ask twice when you say you’re fine, and occasionally decide that another human being’s pain deserves attention even when there is absolutely nothing in it for them.

Community is not a noun.

It’s a collection of inconvenient verbs.

And maybe that’s what I miss most: not some romanticized version of another country or culture where everyone behaves beautifully. Cruelty has no nationality. Neither does kindness.

I miss the assumption that we are, to some degree, responsible for keeping one another human.

Because I don’t think empathy is something you either inherited correctly in childhood or are excused from possessing forever. It can be practiced. Refined. Expanded. We can become more attentive to the weight other people carry without volunteering to carry all of it ourselves.

The alternative is a world populated by extraordinarily well-boundaried people with nobody left to call.

So yes, maybe everyone’s a bitch and nobody cares.

Or maybe we’ve simply spent so long mistaking emotional self-protection for emotional intelligence that we’ve forgotten one of the oldest requirements of living among other human beings:

your heart is yours, but it was never meant to concern itself exclusively with you.

And that makes me wonder—if a society becomes so good at protecting its peace that nobody is willing to be disturbed by another person’s pain, what exactly are we protecting?