Empathy is good. Simple statement, simple fact. But what of the cost of denying someone the expression or action of empathy? What of the pain of being forced into an anti-empathetic action? The most dramatic examples of this come from military service, when soldiers are trained to suppress their empathetic feelings for the “enemy” so […]
The New York Times published a provocative op ed piece on May 5 by Michael Ventura (author of Applied Empathy) called “The Dark Side of Empathy”. It asserts that there are two kinds of empathy: “affective empathy (the ability to feel what others feel) is distinct from cognitive empathy (the ability to understand what others […]
Often we set goals, and schedules to meet them. I will exercise 3 times a week. I will eat beans twice a week. I will read fiction every day for at least half an hour. I will write in my journal daily. Etc. What if we added empathy goals to our lives? It wouldn’t be […]
Who would have thought we’d have needed to write a blog post defending empathy as a good thing? But here we are… We all thought empathy is an indisputably positive trait, but Elon Musk is here to set us straight. He was on the Joe Rogan show recently (2/28) where he expounded on his belief […]
An important part of empathy is connection. We make a connection with others, whether directly, or through reading or viewing or other means. What if we connected with more others–not just humans, but other living beings? Animals, certainly. Our home (that is, our planet) would be a much better place if we responded to animals with empathy–our […]
There are lots of ways to gain empathy for others. There’s the media—books, TV, movies, online videos, podcasts. There are the people we meet—co-workers from different cultures, students at the university we are attending, neighbors down the street who maybe put up a menorah in their window in December instead of a Christmas tree. The […]
To quote probably the most-often quoted opening line in literature: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” In this case, for empathy. Lookin back at 2022, what first comes to mind is the growing movement worldwide for LGBTQ+ people. As Charles Dickens continues on in his opening sentence: “it was […]
Shortly after Roe v. Wade went into effect, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mom and my grandma. I asked them what they thought about abortion. As I expected, my mom said she thought it was wrong. But my grandma surprised me when she said she was in favor of legal abortion. […]
“Ally.” It’s a buzzword you hear frequently. People who are white, heterosexual, male, Christian, etc. want to be allies to those who are in a more marginalized or oppressed group. But how? In this month of June, as we celebrate both Juneteenth and Gay Pride, let’s think about that. The first steps are listening and […]
It is tempting to think that one is expanding one’s empathy for others by, for example, listening to a podcast by a person of color and extrapolating from that to assure oneself that one now has empathy for all people of color. And sure, it is a step on the road to expanding one’s empathetic […]