Empathy hasn't disappeared. It has simply been transferred from one sector to another, from real life to the marketing and entertainment departments.
You no longer need to experience it. You need to know how to reproduce it as an atmosphere.
Those who manage capital and imagination are not concerned with people's emotional lives: they measure their reactivity.
If music, a look, or a phrase generates a micro-grimace, that is enough. The rest—everything that does not produce data or consumption—is considered unprocessable human noise.
While wages, homes, and time are subtracted with administrative precision, an increasing amount of packaged sentiment is supplied in return: dubbed fiction, television smiles delivered at low body temperature, commercials that imitate intimacy.
It is not closeness. It is the emotional management of the population.
Those who control symbolic production have no interest in being empathetic. They have an interest in making you feel momentarily considered.
So, while you scroll through a Turkish series constructed as a universal tutorial on pain, the machine can continue to operate undisturbed. No revolt begins on a sofa warmed by a packaged emotional plot.
EMOTION AS A HIGH-MARGIN PRODUCT
Emotion no longer arises between two human beings. It arises during a briefing.
The industrial cost of certain objects—perfumes, identity-defining garments, motivational gadgets—is minimal. The most expensive part is not the substance, but the construction of the emotional atmosphere surrounding the object.
The formula is worth three euros. The rest of the price covers the story: “You deserve to be seen.”
In the internal training documents of sales departments, empathy is not considered a human quality, but a customer engagement technique.
You are not asked to listen: you are taught to tilt your head at the right angle, to lower your voice to simulate understanding, to say “I understand” at predetermined points in the conversation.
Real empathy is inefficient. The copy is easier to manage and produces a margin.
COLDNESS AS A COMMAND STANDARD
The managers of public narrative speak in a calibrated, surgical tone, devoid of warmth.
Not out of malice, but to keep the machine stable.
They announce restrictions, cuts, and price hikes with the same neutrality with which they communicate a climate statistic.
And immediately afterward, in parallel, the emotional recovery phase is launched: consoling fiction, talk shows, family series constructed to release micro-doses of guided emotion.
The protocol is constant:
-
First phase: cold announcement → real subtraction.
-
Second phase: distribution of artificial warmth → low-cost empathetic narratives.
Power does not produce warmth. It outsources it to packaged cultural products.
TV AND FICTION AS A SURROGATE FOR LIFE FOR THOSE WHO CAN NO LONGER AFFORD THE REAL EXPERIENCE
When income no longer allows for movement—no travel, no novelty, no concrete possibility of choice—a void does not open.
The system fills it with care.
What you cannot experience, they stream to you for €9.90 a month, on subscription platforms where you can select your mood like a filter: want to feel challenged? Loved? Nostalgic? Terrified?
Meanwhile, reality waits for you exactly as it was, with a life as an urban nomad without a stable home, without genuine free time, without room to build something that truly matters.
The remaining time of the impoverished classes is channeled toward prefabricated emotional experiences:
– Turkish series like Bitter Land,
– hospital dramas where empathy is performed as a medical act,
– programs that ritualize collective weeping over stories edited for television.
It is not entertainment. It is the replacement of real experience with a digestible narrative.
They take away your concrete possibility of exploration, and in return offer you a range of off-the-shelf emotions, ready to stream.
It is not enough to be stuck in identical days.
You must also gratefully consume the simulation of the life you can no longer have.
MINIMUM PERCEPTUAL DEFENSE MANUAL
Indignation is not resistance: it is written into the script.
It serves to vent frustration, not to generate clarity, as long as that too is digital, then everything is fine.
The first step is not to rebel, but to stop reacting emotionally like trained spectators. Watch commercials, talk shows, fiction, not as stories, but as industrial devices designed to trigger a precise emotional response. That is why they are called "PROGRAMS" after all.
A question to always ask:
“What do they want me to do after I have experienced this emotion?”
Do not look for understanding in the programming schedule.
It is not designed to make you understand, but to convert emotions into consent or purchase.
What is being sold is not content, but an emotional state with an ROI.
Everything else is scenery.
SRDN.STORE VALUES
SRDN.STORE productions are certainly not outside of this world.
We all work within the same system, with the same exhaustion, in the same corridors of products, words, and promises.
But we choose a different stance: to generate beauty and culture that is less corrupted, organically, without lying, and we commit ourselves to being careful, to not administer prefabricated emotions.
If anything can still alleviate pain, it will not be a fiction or a program, but an authentic gesture, an object made with integrity, a thought spoken without artifice.
A dose of industrial empathy threatens the very concept of dignity, demanding respect even during this passive general decay.