I lost sleep last night. I opened my Wechat chatbox and started a casual conversation with my best friend in high school, Crystal.. She attends an elite university that is almost half of my school’s ranking. I looked at her shining faces in her “moments” and thought she was coping with everything just fine. But it turned out that she had been struggling with her social class and privileges since she made up her mind studying abroad.

Crystal has a penpal from Southwestern of China, where people’s average annual income is below 2000 dollars. Her penpal yearns for studying abroad, but for a little town girl who never took an airplane, it is almost impossible. They are at the same age, but Crystal could pay for the high tuition fee in a top University and pursue her dream in arts. That brought her a sense of powerless guilty facing with people in a lower class than her.

However, in front of those people higher than her own class, she has a sense of envy and reconcile. Among some of her friends in college, some live off campus and keep paying high accommodation fees, some spend a lot of money on their collections, and some have traveled to hundreds of countries at a young age…

The privileges of people in different classes intersects while studying and living in the same world. At the intersection of different privileges, people are prone to feel powerless. Rather than intertwine with these powerlessness, we may need to think more about how to understand others across these social classes, and whether it is necessary to understand everything. People at each class have their own goals, and the life patterns derives from them. Living in their own mode of life, everyone has the right to tell others: “You are not me, you don’t understand my life and difficulties at all!”

Quite interesting, maybe we can call this phenomenon: Squeeze Theorem for Privilege.

However, a person will not give up one’s own privileges, nor will he conceal the yearning for more privileges. A truth is that we are losing our empathy. We are becoming more distant from each other as technology advances in the digital era. We become numb to our surroundings and to other people’s emotions, joys, and sadness. Putting oneself in an individual’s place and feeling the same way they do is becoming increasingly difficult. People may judge other people more frequently, instead of trying to empathy with them. Our society has lost the beauty of being there for others. As a result, empathy has become a lost virtue.

What’s worse, those who keep empathy for other people may feel more powerless in digital age, just like Crystal. According to the Global Risks Report 2019, technology is actually making the world more anxious, less connected, unhappy, and the rise of people feeling lonely is higher than ever especially within my generation.(Cited from Nadia Aimé’s online journal) Cyrstal’s penpal sees the world outside of the mountains on the Internet and yearns for the life outside, but the truth is that she may never have the chance to study and live outside. Will she feel despaired in the future? Is it unfair for her to know the world outside via digital accesses?

So, do you feel you’re squeezed between privileges and losing your digital empathy?

PS. The chart of Squeeze Theorem For Privilege is inspired by Squeeze Theorem For Limits in calculus class.