Compassion Overload Breeds Paralysis

As the moral 'circle' expands to include distant people, smartphones bring their suffering into constant view and add audience pressure to perform concern. Our limited moral circuits get overwhelmed, producing doom‑talk and inaction rather than problem‑solving. The result is a culture of apocalyptic vibes with business‑as‑usual behavior. — This reframes civic malaise as a design problem of globalized empathy and performative pressure, implying the need for moral triage and bounded responsibility to restore agency.