Empathy Isn't Scarce. Attention is.

In the first days of January 2026, widespread protests erupted across Iran amid soaring inflation and a collapsing currency. Demonstrations that began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar quickly spread to dozens of cities, with security forces responding with tear gas, live ammunition, and mass arrests. Rights groups reported that at least 34 protesters had been killed and more than 2,000 arrested within the first week of nationwide unrest.

At the same time in the United States, protests ignited around the country after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis on January 7. Hundreds of people marched in cities including Seattle and Madison to honor the woman’s life and condemn the shooting by federal authorities.

Both events were deeply consequential in their own contexts. Both involved loss of life and sparked collective action. Yet, in many public conversations and media cycles, one remained visible for much longer while the other slid from view. This discrepancy reveals something important about how moral concern operates today. It isn’t that people don’t care. It’s that attention — not empathy — is the bottleneck.

We often speak of empathy as if it were a finite moral commodity: if we care about one crisis, we must somehow lack concern for another. But this framing is misleading. Empathy is not an internal reservoir to be depleted by use. It’s a response that depends on what we can actually hold in focus.

In a world saturated with information, the number of crises demanding moral attention far exceeds the human capacity to sustain emotional engagement with all of them. The brain does not distribute empathy equally. It distributes attention first — and empathy tends to follow.

That’s why some atrocities or injustices occupy headlines for weeks while others disappear within days. It’s not that one matters more; it’s that one stays in the field of public attention long enough to be felt.

The Iranian protests of January 2026 are a case in point. Despite verified reports of dozens of deaths, including teenagers and young adults caught in violent crackdowns, and a nationwide internet blackout that limited independent coverage, this movement quickly faded from global discourse as other news cycles took over.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the killing of a woman by a federal agent became the focus of sustained public vigils, marches, and social media attention — in part because it was easy to access, familiar in form, and connected to ongoing national debates about policing and federal enforcement.

Visibility matters. Narratives matter. Proximity matters. These structural factors shape what becomes memorable and what becomes background noise.

This is not to dismiss the moral urgency of either situation. It is to recognize that what we choose to attend to is influenced less by the inherent worth of suffering and more by how — and how persistently — it is presented to us. A crisis that captures sustained media focus, that fits existing narratives, or that resonates with familiar cultural frames will attract attention. Another crisis, even if equally grave, may be eclipsed.

In this sense, selective outrage is not always evidence of moral deficiency. It is often evidence of how overloaded our cognitive and social attention systems are.

This insight reframes the way we think about empathy. If empathy were truly scarce, we would be unable to feel deeply about anything. But most people feel intense concern for some events even as they remain unaware of others. The problem is not that people do not care. The problem is that there is not enough attention to sustain care for everything that deserves it.

Understanding this dynamic has ethical implications. It suggests that expanding moral concern is not just a matter of willing ourselves to care more. It is a matter of creating and sustaining conditions in which attention can be shared more equitably. That means media structures that resist rapid churn, public discourse that integrates context rather than fragmenting it, and audiences that understand attention itself as a moral resource.

The point is not that people are uncaring. It’s that the world asks more of our moral attention than we are designed to hold at once.

To demand more empathy without addressing how attention is allocated is to ask people to feel deeply without giving them something stable to look at. The Iranian protests and the U.S. demonstrations in January 2026 both deserved — and still deserve — sustained moral engagement. What is scarce is not compassion, but the space in which compassion can unfold.

Empathy isn’t limited. Attention is.