Empathy Be Damned!

Whatever became of empathy? Where did that innate, unspoken compassion for our fellow humans disappear to? It sure seems to be missing these days.

You know what I mean by empathy, right? It’s the ability to truly feel what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes—even if those shoes are ones you’ve never worn yourself. Often, empathy starts with recognizing familiar pain in others (empathy is not limited to understanding and “feeling” pain, however!), even when you’re not experiencing it yourself at the moment. A healthy psyche lets us project our own understanding of suffering (or joy!) onto someone else’s situation. For instance, if I’ve never lost a child but a friend has, I can relate their grief to any profound loss I’ve endured. Pain is pain, after all—human suffering connects us on a fundamental level. If we trust the person sharing their hurt, it doesn’t matter whether we think their experience “should” cause such pain; we empathize with what they’re feeling. Unless, of course, we suspect they’re lying—but often, we can see the truth in their eyes or actions.

Even though a lack of empathy is usually associated with a lack of understanding pain in another, it is not limited to pain—empathy is fundamentally about sharing and understanding any emotional state in another person, positive or negative. For example, you might empathize with a friend’s exhilaration over a big promotion by tapping into your own memories of achievement, allowing you to genuinely share in their excitement, pride, or relief. This broader view fosters deeper connections, as it applies to joy, love, frustration, curiosity, or even neutral experiences like boredom, helping us build rapport across the full range of human emotions rather than just during hardship. For this article, however, we will focus on the pain issue.