The Atrophy of Becoming
Empathy is not feeling for others but temporarily becoming them. Fiction's first-person narratives trained this cognitive shapeshifting - readers had to abandon their own perspective entirely and inhabit another consciousness. We lived stories from within, not without.
The shift to observational media has cost us this mental flexibility. Watching makes us judges anchored to our viewpoint; reading once made us inhabitants learning to see through different eyes.
What we call empathy's decline might be perspective-taking's atrophy - the gradual loss of our ability to think in any voice but our own.