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This month's article is more feelings than facts, I take both those factors to be equally important and vital in understanding different aspects of our world. So I am going to talk a little about my feelings on Empathy. People often get confused between Empathy and Sympathy, they sound similar but there is a fundamental difference between the two. Oxford dictionary defines them as
Empathy /ˈɛmpəθi/
Noun
The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Sympathy /ˈsɪmpəθi/
Noun
Feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune:
So from what I understand, sympathy is more of a detached feeling. It's when we are in a relatively privileged position looking at someone who maybe in pain or suffering of some kind. It's more like observing the situation and feeling bad or pity for the person who is in that state. Whereas empathy, I understand, is to be a step further from sympathy. empathy is not just observing a situation and feeling sorrowful, but it's more of feeling what the other person is feeling right in the moment. It's the ability to understand the other person's perspective; to be able to put yourself in their shoe - which further aids you to help the person feel better.
So I found this video which talks about Empathy and Sympathy by Brene Brown. I really like the points she makes on empathy. Although her perspective on sympathy is a little more harsh and exaggerated, it's worth considering.
In I Thought it Was Just Me (But It Isn't) (2008), Brown references nursing scholar Theresa Wiseman's four attributes of empathy:
To be able to see the world as others see it—This requires putting your own "stuff" aside to see the situation through your loved one's eyes.
To be nonjudgmental—Judgement of another person's situation discounts the experience and is an attempt to protect ourselves from the pain of the situation.
To understand another person's feelings—We have to be in touch with our own feelings in order to understand someone else's. Again, this requires putting your own "stuff" aside to focus on your loved one.
To communicate your of that person's feelings—Rather than saying, "At least you..." or "It could be worse..." try, "I've been there, and that really hurts," or (to quote an example from Brown) "It sounds like you are in a hard place now. Tell me more about it."
In summary to what Brown has to say, to which I largely agree, empathy is an ability or a skill which requires one to be understanding in the purest form - unhindered by judgement or personal concerns. Being able to empathize is not the ability give immediate and appropriate solutions but to understand that sometimes there are no solutions, there is no immediate pain relief. And people are warranted to feel that pain. Being empathetic also makes you aware of how your words or actions can affect someone, it makes you more careful and generous towards other people's feelings. And I think that is an extremely important quality.
In our current world, I feel like people's empathy threshold has been positively increasingly, meaning people have more difficulty to empathize with others for numerous reasons. As being the internet generation tangled in the social web, people are becoming unapologetically cruel.
For instance 'Trolling', as we call it now, is a social trend which started off as a slang for pranking or harmless fun; but somewhere along the line it has become an excuse for people to be plain mean and hateful. With the amount of accessibility and anonymity internet has provided us, it has become easier for people to spew out hate without considering the consequences - which has made Cyber Bullying a legitimate concern.
Another instance that displays how the internet can get unforgivingly unempathetic is when very enthusiastic people blinded by their thirst for justice rally on a witch hunt to take down fellow internet user based on assumptions or past mistakes. I've seen an alarming number of people driven out of social media sites because of something that they said, which was either taken out of context or it was a genuine mistake. There is no room left for learning or even considering that everyone isn't as knowledgeable on all social issues. Not everyone knows how to say everything politically correct. People have become so alarmingly ignorant to intentions and they are greatly fixated on words and actions alone. If you genuinely want someone to learn about a thing you deem important, try not to go all caps. However, I do recognize that some people intentionally do horrible things. Some call themselves trolls, some call it 'being themselves'. The important thing is to assess how your action and words can affect someone else, when that someone else is You.
Lastly I have two videos from an Internet Personality (who I personally quite adore) on topics of Empathy and Internet hate.
