Month: August 2025

Say hello to the bystander planet

Imagine your neighbour’s house is on fire, but you’re too busy scrolling through social media to call for help, or you just assume someone else will handle it. Scale that up globally, and you’ve captured how public apathy operates during major crises.

Public indifference isn’t just inconvenient – it can be deadly. When people mentally check out from global problems governments lose political pressure to act, funding disappears and windows of opportunity close. The psychology behind this is well-documented. Our brains respond more to individual stories than mass statistics. One child in a well captivates us. 25,000 children dying daily from preventable causes is easily filed away and forgotten.

The consequences can be devastating. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, 800,000 people died in 100 days while public pressure for intervention remained virtually nonexistent. Climate change offers another stark example. Despite scientific consensus since the 1990s, Yale research shows only 8% of Americans are worried enough to take action, giving politicians cover to delay meaningful responses for decades.

History does, however, show that apathy can be overcome. Live Aid concerts in 1985 transformed abstract Ethiopian famine statistics into urgent, actionable concern for millions. The 2014 ALS Ice Bucket Challenge used social media to raise $115 million and massive awareness for a rare disease. Environmental movements have learned to make climate change feel local and immediate rather than distant and abstract.

The most effective strategies combine emotional storytelling with clear actions, make distant problems feel personal and local, and give people confidence their contributions matter. Youth climate activists like Greta Thunberg have been particularly successful at creating urgency around problems that for many seemed distant.

Breaking through public apathy isn’t about making people feel guilty, though. It’s about understanding human psychology and designing engagement accordingly. As global challenges intensify, overcoming indifference isn’t optional – it’s existential. The biggest problems facing humanity can only be solved when enough people decide it’s worth solving.

If you feel confused, angry, disenfranchised or simply frustrated at the state of the world, check out my new project, apathy to action. You are not alone. 

From apathy to action

Twenty years ago this summer I was sat at a kitchen table in Finland writing the early beta version of FrontlineSMS, a project which would go on to define my contribution to what was, back then, the fledgling world of mobiles-for-development. I’ve had a brush with the odd idea or two since, but never really launched a project in the same spirit. Until now.

It took a few of my recent LinkedIn posts discussing humanitarian crises around the world, in particular the horrors taking place in Gaza, that got me thinking. Most passed through people’s feeds without comment or reaction, but I refused to believe that people didn’t care about what was going on. It’s the same with environmental issues such as the climate crisis. We’re all now living its reality, and many people speak about their concern but don’t act. Why?

Unlike many of the problems that FrontlineSMS helped solve, apathy is something I suffer from myself, making this the first time I have a very personal motivation in trying to solve something. Public apathy to global crises is such a huge problem, too, and I haven’t found much about it online. All of this makes it a particularly exciting initiative for me.

apathy to action is a research and development project combining principles of Buddhist thinking with global activism, neurology and the latest behavioural research to identify technology-based solutions that help lift people who genuinely care from a point of apathy and helplessness to one of empathy, action and change.

The first phase of the project will last until the end of the year, and will focus on building a vibrant community of interest of people who feel a mixture of anger, powerlessness, frustration and disempowerment around global issues. The project launched with a founding essay which looks at the causes and impact of public apathy to global crises. I’ll be posting the essay as a separate post soon, but you can read it here if you can’t wait.

We’ll be firming up plans for the project in the coming months, but in the meantime we’d love for you to join us. If you feel any sense of apathy to what’s going on in the world you can find us on facebook and LinkedIn. And if you don’t use (or don’t want to use) either of those platforms, you can sign up with email, too.

I hope to see you there.