[scottlamb]

I hear you...to an extent. I just got off the phone with Comcast Business Class, asking for a refund after I had 26 hours of downtime in the past week. Not a company with a great reputation for customer service, and the agent I spoke with was probably not exactly earning a six-figure salary. He was empathetic. The outcome was unsatisfactory [1], but he was polite, he said he understood how important availability is my business, he put me on hold for a while, said he tried for more with his manager, and I believed him. That's all it takes, not like a master study in empathizing with your bitter enemy and de-escalating conflict. I'm mad at Comcast, but I'm not mad at him.

[1] A discount that was less than the delta between consumer-class and business-class prices, when the latter doesn't seem to actually be providing better availability lately.

[dqv]

I think you're missing the forest for the trees.

Yes, some people thrive on talking to a lot of people. For everyone else, it can be exhausting. It's hard to navigate social differences talking to 15+ strangers every hour for 8 hours. Each person has a unique expectation about how to relate to them. It's hard knowing, for example, who wants to be interrupted and who doesn't [0]. Some people talk in vagueries with exposition, making it hard to understand what it is they want, but feel they have communicated clearly, so get upset at being asked questions. I could go on and on about this. The end result is an absolutely JUICED frontal lobe, though. "Why don't you find another job" is a common question to people and I don't think people with a juiced frontal lobe have the capability to reason their way into getting their resume and applying to new jobs. To remember that comment would be to remember 25 calls ago that someone told you to find a new job.

> He was empathetic.

I don't understand what this means when people say it. Empathetic means having empathy for someone, which means imagining being in their situation, and feeling the feeling associated with that situation. That takes a long time for me, like a few minutes, uninterrupted, at least. So either I would have to lie and say "wow, that must be so frustrating", which is not empathy, that's just saying words that sound like empathy. And that brings me next to the next thing I don't understand... either that person was also lying or somehow people have the ability to just contemporaneously download the feelings of other people, feel them, but also not act like they're feeling them (because how are you supposed to feel frustrated without being frustrated?) so as not to make the customer upset.

Customers hate to hear (in a sort of "stop being upset that's annoying" way) sadness or anxiety or the braced statements of a person (often perceived as rude) used to having to repeat, for the 50th time, something people don't want to hear. I do have the empathy to recognize this when a customer service agent does it and cut them the slack because probably had to spend all their empathy on someone else.

Then I read about things like surface acting vs deep acting and see that the surface acting part is bad for your emotional health but that deep acting takes a lot of extra energy [1]!

Finally I ask the question of am I evolved to even be able to socially interact with 120 strangers in a given day?

"that's all it takes" might be underselling the dynamic here.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/25/opinion/interrupting-coop... https://archive.is/I4RpG

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor#Surface_and_de...

[johnnyanmac]

>Yes, some people thrive on talking to a lot of people. For everyone else, it can be exhausting. It's hard to navigate social differences talking to 15+ strangers every hour for 8 hours a day.

Okay. It's a job. I know choices are slim, but "its hard for my mental state" has never been a satisfactory excuse to further displease customers.

>So either I would have to lie and say "wow, that must be so frustrating", which is not empathy,

Sometimes a little white lie is easier than a cold hard truth. Just ask any salesman.

>And that brings me next to the next thing I don't understand... either that person was also lying or somehow people have the ability to just contemporaneously download the feelings of other people, feel them, but also not act like they're feeling them

Given the author is blind, I imagine he's better than average at reading the tone of voice. He could have interpreted it wrong, but I'm sure this dismissive tone isn't new to him.

>Finally I ask the question of am I evolved to even be able to socially interact with 120 strangers in a given day?

Probably not. But I'm not sure what you want me to say. I don't want to be the same as Karen and say "suck it up, it's a job. But this is such a commin feeling on modern society. If we aren't going to collectively rise against its, we're bearing the flood alone.

Given how we're still actively drowning people, I don't see us coming together soon.

[dqv]

This is missing the forest for the trees. You are ignoring the wider corpus of the individual's experiences in favor of a single negative interaction, and then using that single interaction, isolated from all their other experiences, to judge the entirety of their character.

> Okay. It's a job. I know choices are slim, but "its hard for my mental state" has never been a satisfactory excuse to further displease customers.

The chemical reality of the the frontal lobe getting exhausted is not an "excuse". It still misses the forest for the trees: if your frontal lobe (the part of the brain responsible for social understanding, reasoning, executive function, and information recall [0]) is taxed, you are way less likely to even understand that you're displeasing the customer! The ultimate irony here is the tool needed to understand how to not do that thing anymore is also the frontal lobe.

> Sometimes a little white lie is easier than a cold hard truth. Just ask any salesman.

That's a nice way to soften it, but pretending to empathize with someone who you're not actually empathizing with sounds psychopathic. I don't want to model my behavior nor do I want anyone else to model their behavior after an industry that is known for dark triad personalities [1]. A lie is still a lie and lying about something so intimate as feeling their experiences doesn't sit right with me at all. You should read the link I posted in my earlier comment which discusses surface acting and how it is very taxing on the individual.

> Given the author is blind, I imagine he's better than average at reading the tone of voice. He could have interpreted it wrong, but I'm sure this dismissive tone isn't new to him.

Reading a stranger's tone is a guess and negativity bias affects our perception of a stranger's intent [2]. The sum of their total negative experiences absolutely can make them interpret someone else's tone as having "dismissive" intent even though it's just as likely to be what I already described: braced speech in anticipation for a person responding to something they don't want to hear.

And there you can see negativity bias on both sides! The difference is that the representative gets no post-call time to consider what happened before they have to take the next call and they have the issue of not really having the foresight to actively introspect and keep a strong sense of understanding the situation the customer is going through. (As a reminder, both foresight and introspection require some level of functioning frontal lobe, which is already getting juiced for the next social interaction that's about to happen).

> Probably not. But I'm not sure what you want me to say. I don't want to be the same as Karen and say "suck it up, it's a job. But this is such a commin feeling on modern society. If we aren't going to collectively rise against its, we're bearing the flood alone.

I'm not sure what you mean, you effectively said "suck it up, it's a job" at the beginning of your comment when you said "Okay. It's a job". Of course no one wants to be the same as Karen, Karen doesn't want to be the same as Karen, but as I've already explained, is incapable of extricating herself from the dysfunction! Her frontal lobe is shot!

But the author? He does have that capability after the interaction. He is an author, with time to introspect. He chose to be an ass hole instead. Of course, his growth over the years has been stunted by the way he has been treated. I am not in the business of dredging up someone's life experiences and putting them on display, but he has painful experiences beyond being blind in a society not built for blind people.

But I have the privilege of being able to see all that and take it into consideration. Karen does not. She doesn't have the hint about his upbringing that I do. She probably doesn't have the time or mental capacity to introspect, and consider, if what she's doing makes people feel bad.

I can fault neither of these people for being ass holes, because that would amount to faulting them for their upbringing, faulting them for the situation they're in.

> But I'm not sure what you want me to say.

I don't want you to say anything, I want you to think about what empathy really means beyond the surface level. That this isn't a situation where anyone should be trying to say "who has experienced the most hardship" so we can pick who wins empathy and who gets labelled an ass hole for perpetuity.

I want people to stop doing the thing where they only empathize with the person most like them and instead try to feel what it's like to be like the person who is least like them. Sometimes that's not intuitive. Just because the dude is blind doesn't mean he isn't more like you than the person who isn't.

[0]: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24501-frontal-lob... [1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90775564/the-dark-side-of-the-sa... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias#Attribution_of...

[johnnyanmac]

>I want you to think about what empathy really means beyond the surface level.

Empathy is caring for your fellow person and internalizing that to advance causes that benefit us all.

But empathy can fall into the paradox of tolerance as well. You can't empathize with the orange man who wants to see you out of the country and your kid on an island. Anyone who is a drag on the cause can't be carried, because their mindset is to drag you backwards, if not outright eliminate you.

Those are the two aspects I balance in my mind. I try to give basic respect to anyone I meet and run into, but there are some individuals you need to cut out if you want to achieve your goals.

>I want people to stop doing the thing where they only empathize with the person most like them and instead try to feel what it's like to be like the person who is least like them.

Sure. Already doing it. If anything I probably relate a lot more to Karen. miserable office job I hate making not enough money and stuck in a horrible system with little advancement, and increasingly little control over my life. Outside of "we like tech" and "we met annoying people", I probably don't relate much with the author.

The only difference between me and karen is that I've learned to hold my tongue and not take my frustrations out on others. It kind of helps when the clients are children; there's no optics win for yelling at a kid for me. The kids will simply double down or break down, boss will reprimand me, the parents will reprimand me. If that's my consequences for these actions, what's there to empathize here with Karen?

I'm not mad "at" Karen. I'm mad at the wider system that creates Karens as they are put in, chewed, and spit out. I do want better for all of us, but I also don't have the professional capacity to help people like Karen along the way. Odds are they will also actively drag the cause for all of us down. I can't save everyone.