| I'd like to chime in on one very narrow issue that's a personal axe. I'd appreciate your consideration. Due to some widely shared youtube videos and other new and zeitgeisty trends, empathy has been put on a pedestal and sympathy and been thoroughly denigrated. The problem is that people are not that capable of real empathy in complex or strongly divergent experiences, this modern "synthetic empathy" generated in peoples imaginations is actively harmful, is not empathy, and is worse than sympathy (which was always a serviceable emotion and the most accurate framing for many circumstances.) As someone born with a heart defect that almost killed them and forced me into formative and constant meditation on death starting at 4 years old, and then had my parents die young and my family financially ruined by medical bills so I had to quit highschool and start working fulltime I have personally observed that empathy as a mental model has a strong failure mode. I doubt at 15 you could have had empathy for me, (unless you shared a similar experience) I doubt older wiser you could still empathize with 15 year old me in any meaningful way, certainly no peer I ever met at the time could (agqin, unless they had dealt with the same.) I think peoples ability to empathize has been far oversold, so while you can understand and empathize with "silly things", outside of that I'd settle for some good old fashioned (and real) sympathy. Sympathy has a certain acknowledgment of lack of understanding and thus intellectual and emotional humility, and I think humility is what is missing in this modern synthetic empathy. Experiences in general and certainly extremely divergent ones do not have the same qualia and empathy is a false siren. People don't understand as much as they think, they should show sympathy to those whose experiences are far outside their own and help them tangibly when possible. |