Can you expand on this?
These vague notions that we're losing our humanity is getting boring.
Not trying to resurrect this fight again but I finally have a good answer for you. From Camus' The Plague:
Did our fellow-citizens, at least those who suffered the most from this separation, ever get used to the situation? It would not be quite correct to say that they did. Rather, they suffered a kind of spiritual and physical emaciation. At the start of the plague they remembered the person whom they had lost very well and they were sorry to be without them. But though they could clearly recall the face and the laugh of the loved one, and this or that day when, after the event, they realized they had been happy, they found it very hard to imagine what the other person might be doing at the moment when they recalled her or him, in places which were now so far away. In short, at that time they had memory but not enough imagination. At the second stage of the plague the memory also went. Not that they had forgotten the face, but (which comes to the same thing) it had lost its flesh and they could only see it inside themselves. And while in the early weeks they tended to complain at only having shadows to deal with where their loves were concerned, they realized later that these shadows could become still more fleshless, losing even the details of colour that memory kept of them. After this long period of separation, they could no longer imagine the intimacy that they had shared nor how a being had lived beside them, on whom at any moment they could place their hands.
From this point of view, they had entered into the very system of the plague which was all the more efficient for being mediocre. No one among us experienced any great feelings any more, but everyone had banal feelings. 'It's time it ended,' they said, because, in a period of pestilence, it is normal to wish for the end of collective suffering and because they really did want it to end. But the words were spoken without the anger or bitterness of the early days, and only with the few arguments that still remained clear to us, which were feeble ones. The great, fierce surge of feeling of the first weeks had given way to a dejection that it would be wrong to confuse with resignation, but which was despite that a kind of provisional assent.
The townspeople had adapted, they had come to heel, as people say, because that was all they could do. Naturally, they still had an attitude of misfortune and suffering, but they did not feel its sting. Dr Rieux, for one, considered that the misfortune lay precisely in this, and that the habit of despair was worse than despair itself. Previously, those separated had not really been unhappy, their suffering had a brightness that had just gone out. Now one could see them on the corner of the street, in cafes or with their friends, placid, their minds wandering and their eyes so bored that, thanks to them, the whole town seemed like a waiting-room. Those who had jobs did them at the pace of the plague, meticulously and prosaically. Everyone was simple and unpretentious. For the first time, those separated did not mind speaking about their absent ones, adopting the language of all and studying their separation just as they would study the statistics of the epidemic. While up to this point they had fiercely subtracted their suffering from the sum of collective misfortune, now they accepted it as part of the whole. Without memory and without hope, they settled into the present. In truth, everything became present for them. The truth must be told: the plague had taken away from all of them the power of love or even of friendship, for love demands some future, and for us there was only the here and now.
