We’re all parasites

That’s just how humans work: If you don’t see or ‘feel’ bad things happening with your own eyes, you just don’t feel much empathy for whoever is being hurt. That’s why journalists go into those regions and take pictures of the suffering to show to the people of the world. A title saying “100 children starved to death” is way weaker than an actual image of a malnourished child; the reasons for this are mainly biological. Another example were the allies of WW2 who took parts of the German population to go through the concentration camps to witness the cruelty with their own eyes.

It’s hard to say whether this is a good thing or not: On the one hand we don’t do much for the suffering in the world because we don’t witness it ourselves, but on the other hand could we even live a happy life if we would experience a death of someone we don’t know the same way we experience the death of a family member?
But yes, I agree with you that most people nowadays could use some more empathy towards real suffering rather than some minor inconveniences which celebrities may have experienced lately (exaggeration alert!).