Natalia Naman Temesgen: Out of sight, but never out of mind

I’ve been getting a lot of calls from the city of Boston lately. Back when we lived there, I signed up for their emergency notification system. We had a couple of Nor’easters and, oh, a little bombing incident while we lived there, so those alerts came in handy.

I forgot all about them until a couple of weeks ago, when the first big blizzard came through the Boston area. In no time, my voicemail was piling up. "Stay off the roads." "All schools are canceled." "Snow parking is in effect." Delete. Delete. Delete. No offense, city of Boston, but I live in the city of Columbus now, where 50 degrees is cold. I don't need to hear about your snow.

Then the second blizzard hit. Another wave of voicemails hit my phone. As I listened, deleted, listened, deleted, listened, deleted, I started to feel an uncomfortable sensation. Something like guilt. A couple of years ago, these alerts would have meant a lot to me. But now that I'm gone, I hardly care. Honestly, I barely thought to reach out to the Bostonians we knew. I was dealing with my own day and its problems. I couldn't really be bothered.

Back on June 28, I wrote a column about Detroit. I was disappointed in America's ability to turn a blind eye to a suffering city that was once a crown jewel. I was frustrated by how quickly we fell out of love, forgot, and moved on. Now, I'm dismayed by my ability to act just the same. If emergency alerts from a place I used to call home aren't enough to at least provoke me to give someone up there a call, how can I expect to care for a place or a person even more foreign?

A recent Wall Street Journal article, "When Stress Rises, Empathy Suffers" by Robert Sapolsky, says recent studies confirm that stress hormones disrupt aspects of empathy in humans. If your daily life induces stress, the odds are higher that you'll be less responsive to the hurt or pain of people around you. Even more so if that person or his or her plight is foreign to you.

It may not come as a surprise that we have a natural inclination to empathize with people we know or identify with, rather than strangers. It's not because we're evil. It's chemical. The studies' tests showed that when chemicals and hormones were manipulated, human volunteers felt equal empathy for both strangers and friends.

So until they come out with an empathy pill, how do we learn to care more about things that aren't directly affecting us? Would an emergency alert about a crisis across the country trigger your empathy? Or how about non-stop media focus on a certain issue -- does that make us care more? Maybe we have to illuminate the ways we are similar to the people in trouble -- remind ourselves that we aren't so different and trick our brains into thinking our strangers are friends. Maybe then an emergency alert will make us do more than hit "delete."

Natalia Naman Temesgen is an independent correspondent. Contact her at nataliadian1@gmail.com or on Twitter@cafeaulazy.

This story was originally published February 7, 2015 at 4:28 PM with the headline "Natalia Naman Temesgen: Out of sight, but never out of mind."