If I asked you to describe empathy, you’d probably end up describing something else called theory of mind.
Psychopaths1 have theory of mind, but their empathy is limited. Autistic people have empathy, but struggle with theory of mind.
Theory of mind is how well you can deduce someone’s inner state and predict their behavior. Empathy is how much this knowledge affects you. Does making people happy make you happy? Does their pain cause you pain?
This is a huge shortcoming of colloquial language. When most people say someone is empathetic, they’re referring to both empathy and theory of mind, even though they’re two different things2 that don’t always come hand in hand. Just because someone understands you doesn’t mean they care.
The benefits of having good theory of mind is obvious: we live in a society, and getting anything done requires other people’s cooperation. The highest ROI skill in the world is simply being likable, which is another way of saying making people feel understood.
However, the utility of empathy is less obvious. For most of my life I never saw it.
I used to have a cynical, self-centered moral standard: I and the few people I loved mattered; as long as we were all right, the rest of the world wasn’t my problem.
I had a way of looking down on people who were less clever or capable, convinced that their suffering was self-inflicted. I’m a highly3disagreeable person by nature so being callous came naturally.
It felt like a freeing belief, but it was actually a deeply limiting one.
For one, it disincentivized paying close attention to other people, holding me back from learning many of the very important lessons I outlined here.
My life has become both selfishly, tangibly better (health, wealth, and happiness) and spiritually richer since I decided to intentionally, deliberately give a shit about other people and the world at large. The next part of this essay is about that.
For actionable observations on empathy, skip two sections down.
I didn't love my grandfather.
His own father died when he was very young. Scrabbling out of poverty with immense talent and determination, he made a much better life for his only son. He also inflicted permanent damage with his tyranny, paranoia, and possessiveness. His last advice to my father was not to make the same mistakes with me.
My grandfather was overtaken by multiple cancers in 2021. In his last months, he came to fiercely cherish an idea of me—a beautiful, brilliant girl who would live a hundred years and be the redemption of our tattered family. I would listen helplessly on call as he lavished praise on this girl.
He ran from death till the very end, long after there was any hope of real recovery. I could see the toll it was taking on my father, his face spreading and withering like an overripe fruit, his hair turning gray.
Unsympathetically I hoped the old man would say I am done, enough procedures and pills, let me live out my remaining days in peace.
At the same time I was suffering from rampant insomnia.
I would lay awake at nights thinking about how everything I loved would someday disintegrate and be forgotten.
One day (and maybe that day had already passed) I would taste my mother’s cooking for the very last time. Life was just nectar in a sieve, the only constant my capacity for pain. I felt like a dragon watching its hoard slowly vanish into ether.
In deep pandemic isolation with nothing to distract me, I kept spiraling downwards, plagued by vivid nightmares: I remember hallucinating my grandfather, my father, my mother, and myself—pale, slack-jawed, wrapped in white, carried one after another like so many logs to a pyre.
Almost anything could segway me into this existential dread. I saw death waiting in every crosswalk, every corner.
I tried to confront my fear by ghoulishly consuming videos of corpses, murders, lethal injections, and euthanasia (ending up on some pretty disturbing parts of the internet in the process.) I imagined in great detail how person must have felt in their dying moments.
I randomly called up people from the past, wanting to talk about trivial incidents they had mostly forgotten. It was a ridiculous impulse for closure that came from a deeply serious place. I think people could sense that, because everyone was extremely nice about it.
This is apparently a common reaction to near-death experiences and loss —awareness of your own mortality makes you start to act with forgiveness, gratitude, and compassion.
Maraņasati is a Buddhist death-meditation that practitioners say is the secret to happiness. I’d been involuntarily practicing it for almost a month, but there was no peace or happiness to be found. The inside of my head felt like hell and I didn’t know how to get out.
Eastern philosophy had helped a lot with something I was struggling with a few years ago so it was worth a revisit.
The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant. Moment by moment life flows by, and it is never the same. Perpetual fluctuation is the essence of the perceptual universe. A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone. In comes another one, and then that is gone too. A sound strikes your ears, and then silence.
Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and go. Friends leave, relatives die. Your fortunes go up, and they go down. Sometimes you win, and just as often, you lose. It is incessant: change, change, change; no two moments ever the same.
Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
I had to learn to accept impermanence, to think about it it without panicking, to see things ending as sad but not shocking or upsetting.
Every day is a small death; a newborn is as alive, as mortal as a scared old man dying of cancer. Nothing is protecting me or the people I love; no one sees truly horrible things coming.
A lot of the pain of loss is actually shock, fear, denial, anger, and bitterness. When you live never thinking about the inevitable end of irreplaceable love, the end, when it comes, leaves you gasping.
Learning to accept the end of what you love doesn’t mean you care any less. What’s left, what’s inevitable, is grief: the other side of joy.
You have truly accepted loss when you find yourself moving smoothly into sadness. Life is going to change drastically, but that is okay, you aren’t surprised. Sadness is heavy and hard to hold, but it fills your heart in a way that feels a lot like love.
When I’m conflicted, I picture myself on my deathbed and ask myself what I would most regret. I’m very impulsive and rash by nature, and this has saved me many hasty words and petty jabs.
give a man everything he wants and he will despair
Man is a working animal; without the satisfaction of work, wellbeing is impossible. Daily, purposeful progress is a vital pillar of happiness. This is why executive function disorders are often comorbid with depression.
Old people are known for being a little ridiculous, foolishly clinging to relevance and power. This is because, like most, their Life’s Work was their own comfort or glory—the only reasons they have ever known to get up in the morning. To accept that their time in the sun is over is to render what little life they have left totally devoid of purpose.
However, when you consistently remain aware of—and make peace with—your mortality, you naturally shift your focus towards things that endure beyond yourself. Diminished self-importance is actually deeply freeing; there are many more ways to live happily when life doesn’t have to be all about you. You can play the part of main character, side character, and observer with equal content and ease.
Empathy and ego detachment reinforce each other in a virtuous cycle. Their utility is enduring purpose and freedom, the ability to accept things and let them go with grace.
why you’re afraid of empathy
The truth is, empathy is scary. It requires imagining yourself in another person’s shoes, opening yourself up to the possibility that that could have been you.
Contempt is a barrier defense against empathy; it’s how you distance yourself from people you’re afraid to be like. If you look down on them enough you could never be them. Their problems could never be your problems.
The problem with this is that seriously compromises your self awareness. The more you look down on someone for a particular reason, the harder it becomes to recognize the seeds of that behavior in yourself.
You’re attaching your self-respect to this strong preconception that other people are X and you are the opposite. Strong biases like this hinder understanding, both of yourself and other people.
Eastern philosophy teaches you to see the mind, the body, and the consciousness as separate. This is a useful framework because it gives you enormous agency over the experience of life. Just as the mind can voluntarily control the body, you as a consciousness can learn to control your mind.
However, there’s a deeper implication: if you were born as this person, with their body and mind and circumstances, you would have done exactly as they did. You didn’t choose to be you any more than they chose to be them. Why is their suffering more deserved than yours?
(Andy Weir wrote a short story that takes this thinking to the extreme, and it’s one of more jarring ideas I’ve come across.)
A big upside to this attitude is that it allows for maximal self growth. You become capable of evaluating yourself with much more neutral compassion and clarity. Someone has to be dealt bad hands as far as personality and talent go—why shouldn’t it be you? You cannot make the best of who you are without first confronting your current flaws and limitations.
The naturally corollary to accepting your own shortcomings without judgement is accepting other people’s shortcomings with the same grace. We are all driven mad by the same foolish anxieties and desires.
This realization struck me like a lightning clap, similar to how people describe ego death. My petty dislikes and grudges vanished almost overnight.
empathy vs consideration
Empathy is also not the same thing as consideration. This was a lesson I had to learn the painful way.
Consideration is the art of reducing people’s discomfort. Empathy is the art of reducing people’s pain. Pain and discomfort are very different things—nine times of out ten people would rather endure significant pain than be made uncomfortable.
People are comfortable with what they are used to. They depend on conventions for predictability, stability, and comfort. No one appreciates it when structures they’re familiar with are violated, or when you don’t fit into (and therefore challenge) their model of the world.
Even if you aren’t hurting them, interactions with you become complicated and stressful instead of easy and pleasant. People generally want to navigate situations without thinking too hard; consequently they start avoiding you.
People who are disagreeable—specifically, having very low politeness4 — often believe in delivering the unvarnished truth, no matter how difficult it is to hear. They aren’t afraid to shake things up or behave in a way that is shocking and incomprehensible to most people.
These are good and useful traits, when tempered by pragmatism. It’s impossible to win universal approval: firstly, what pleases one person displeases another; secondly, if you want to get places in life, you have to do things a lot of people cannot or will not do.
But in the end, humans are social creatures. Friendship and community are needs, not nice-to-haves.
If you do want to be a part of a particular group, you have to respect its norms, or at least give the appearance of doing so.
empathy and consideration often come at odds
We’ve all known someone who complains loudly and often about something while never making the obvious changes.
If you care about them very much, the urge to make them see sense is overwhelming. They cannot change their lives without changing who they are and how they look at things, and nothing makes people more uncomfortable.
Your desire to help them is empathetic, but to do so requires being inconsiderate. It’s quite the dilemma.
The unfortunate truth is this: forcing the correct path forward onto someone who is not receptive will never work. You only end up alienating them. It is entirely possible and entirely human to deny something that is staring you in the face. When people are ready for change, they seek it out on their own.
A pragmatic view is that (in a way) everyone is already living the life they want to live. People’s desires are more clearly seen in their actions than in their words.
Having a career you hate is hard, but so is reskilling for a new one. Being in a disrespectful relationship is hard, but so is being alone till you find love again. Being out of shape is hard, but so changing your lifestyle from the ground up.
People complaining is almost never a literal plea for help; they’re expressing dissatisfaction that they can’t have their cake and eat it too.
A happy medium between enabling bad thinking and pushing someone towards changes they don’t really want to make is to listen quietly and change the subject as soon as you can.
When people actually want help, insight, and advice, they usually ask for it very specifically. This is the only time inconsiderate empathy can bear fruit.
empathy’s limits
Empathy is not the same thing as infinite tolerance; you are not doing anyone a favor by protecting them from their own mistakes.
There’s a thin line between caring about people and coddling them. It’s important to remember that no one can be saved from suffering; you’re lucky if you learn your lessons early, with relatively light consequences.
An unfortunate side effect of internalizing the everyone-suffers-and-is-trying-their-best mentality is allowing people to take advantage of you. However, happiness does not have to be a zero-sum game. A big part of being loved and well-adjusted involves learning how to synergistically create happiness for yourself and those around you.
Unfortunately this is one of those things you learn through trial and error. You upset people, hurt people, and sometimes lose people until you figure out how to be good for those around you as well as yourself.
When you protect people you care about from your own pain, you cripple their ability to learn this skill.
Regardless of the nature of the relationship, people who lack assertion unintentionally teach others to be bullies, like how indulgent parents create tyrannical children.
What’s more, you cannot be an agent of good without your mental, physical, and emotional health intact. No one can pour from an empty cup. The price of a sacrificial relationship is your own sense of self.
You start to rely on them for meaning, purpose, and identity: you need them to need you, and that’s never sustainable.
There’s a fine line between drawing a firm boundary and being critical or accusatory. Most people would rather tolerate shitty behavior than act like someone they like is a bad person.
The key is to talk entirely in terms of your own needs, set clear expectations, and emphasize that you know their intentions are not bad.5
when things get hard
We’re all doing our best with what we were given: judgement is as misguided as self-pity. Both feel good in the moment but isolate you in the long run.
Life is not easy for anyone—accepting that is the first step towards true resilience. You cannot save yourself or anyone else from suffering, but suffering that begets empathy and humility is not wasted. In the end, anything that brings people together has inherent value.
Enduring difficulty helps you better understand and serve those who undergo similar struggles. Life getting hard is inevitable; bitterness and self pity are a choice. You can respond to the little voice inside you that wails “Why me?” with a shrug and a smile: “Why not you?”
In the end, the best argument for empathy is granting yourself the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Brightly, the ferryman's smile lit up; softly, he touched Siddhartha's arm and said: “Ask the river about it, my friend! Hear it laugh about it! Would you actually believe that you had committed your foolish acts in order to spare your son from committing them too?
…Would you think, my dear, anybody might perhaps be spared from taking this path? That perhaps your little son would be spared, because you love him, because you would like to keep him from suffering and pain and disappointment? But even if you would die ten times for him, you would not be able to take the slightest part of his destiny upon yourself.”
- Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
people who score high on the O'Hare Scale
Both empathy and theory of mind involve the mirror neuron system - a part of our brain that controls how we perceive other people.
Some examples:
“I need my personal space — I cannot be around someone who’s constantly touchy. It bothers me more than you realize, and you need to stay at least a foot away for me to be comfortable.”
“I’m not able to let the jokes you make roll of me. They make me uncomfortable and I feel disrespected, and if this continues I’ll inevitably start avoiding you. I don’t want to do that, so please lay off.”
Delivered in a serious, calm tone, statements like this are very effective. They work best delivered right when the problematic behavior occurs. I was afraid chastising someone like this would bring down the mood of social occasions until I saw firsthand that this is not necessarily the case. Once you’ve made your point, you can lighten up again, and people will follow your cue. The only person left feeling off is the person you just reprimanded, but they behaved inappropriately and that is how they need to feel for the message to sink in.
Mother nature’s greatest gift is death.
I'm going to need to go and take a two-hour walk to fully think through the thoughts I had when reading the essay; I'm really glad I read this tonight.