Memes DESTROYED Our Empathy | How the Internet Turned Serious Issues Into Jokes

Apartments.com: The place to find a place Booking.com: Find exactly what you're booking for In today’s internet culture, even the most serious events are quickly turned into memes, jokes, and viral content. What starts as humor or coping can slowly change how we emotionally process harm, violence, and political power. In this episode, I talk about how meme culture has shifted from helping us survive difficult realities to often softening their severity. When wars, humanitarian crises, political decisions, and real human suffering are treated like entertainment, it becomes harder to sit with the weight of what’s actually happening. This isn’t about blaming humor or telling people to stop laughing. It’s about examining how constant exposure, irony, and "memeification" can blur the line between what deserves levity and what deserves seriousness. From politics and institutions using “relatable” content, to true crime becoming aesthetic, to how we collectively processed COVID, this conversation explores what happens when everything becomes scrollable content and what that does to empathy, accountability, and understanding. This is a reflective, cultural conversation about how we process reality online, and why discernment matters now more than ever.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.