A simple truth: Conditional empathy ain’t empathy at all. It’s just pattern recognition all gussied up as compassion. It’s a beautiful lie, a delicate deceit. I think we forget that sometimes. I think we lose our way.
They say the first step in fixing a problem is admitting we have one. This is that.
This is me trying to simplify, as I so often do, trying to explain what I felt should probably never had needed explanation, but clearly does. I’m explaining it here, to all of you who I’m entirely positive don’t need this explanation in hopes that by doing so, it’ll reach so many others who so clearly do.
Empathy is not Memory, it’s Imagination.
That’s as simple as I can get it, so I’ll back up a bit, and I’ll explain what I mean just a bit, the heart of this little essay this final day of May. Somehow, we’ve forgotten the simple truth above, the gussying up, the false narrative. But it’s not, and it never will be. It’s just your brain being able to say “Hey, I remember that feeling,” rather than your entire soul being able to say “I haven’t, but I can imagine yours.”
Somehow, we’ve fumbled ourselves into a world (and you can blame whomever you wish here, I won’t be pointing fingers at the usual suspects today) where the endurance of a specific suffering is almost the admission ticket to actually having or displaying real compassion. A world where only those who have served can care about veterans, only mothers who have gone through childbirth can care about other mothers. We’re fragmenting ourselves like doomsday preppers into all these isolated silos of a grief that’s been sanctioned off. Isn’t this the driving mechanism behind so much divide? Isn’t this the battery that powers all the cruelty—both political and societal—that seems to surround us?
I think empathy, true and lasting, is a defiant act of creativity, more than anything else, a force driven by our own creative wills. It’s imagination, not experience, that drives this by stretching our boundaries. Literature, cinema, poetry do this. This community does, too. Witnessing a single act of kindness given from someone who has no possible motivation to give it is more transformative than a thousand essays about it. Empathy, like art, is created only when we think bigger than ourselves, we imagine worlds that do not exist for us, and we conceptualize a life inside it.
I’ve been paying closer and closer attention to this world lately, I’ve been noticing more than ever. I think we’re in such a unique position to witness first hand so many things we cannot possibly fathom living through, that it’s been a constant sparking of emotions for a long, long time. Times are hard, things are rough, there’s more uncertainty and divide than at almost any time I can remember, and still I notice the staggering lack of empathy on display. I wonder, when I sit and ponder all this, if there’s just a convenience to the cruelty that makes it so much more appealing, and I realize that there is quite possibly no cruelty more convenient than “I haven’t been through it.”
Isn’t this just a strange little moral escape hatch? Isn’t this an ejection seat out of the spiraling jet that’s just been hit by a missile and will certainly crash? Unfamiliarity as permission to not truly care, ignorance to ache as the mechanism that deflects responsibility. THIS is what is broken, this is what I ask all, what I invite everyone, to recognize when they see it, whether that’s in themselves or in all those around them.
It’s never been shared experience that defines empathy, it’s always been the ability to imagine someone else’s reality. This is what’s been lost, this has been tossed and turned and thrown wildly into the rubbish bin of history as we’re surviving a world together that bombards us all with people who compare suffering, who infuse themselves into other’s misery, who put a hierarchy on hurting. When this happens, when suffering becomes a competitive sport, when people stop listening, stop leaning in, and somehow compassion becomes something more isolated and tribal, everyone everywhere will retreat into their own realities, their own personal lived in experiences, and it all shuts down. Emotional fragmentation on a scale we’ve never before seen, but are starting to. I believe a world in which empathy requires proof, is a world where compassion just completely disappears.
Empathy begins where experience ends, but they don’t tell you that.
I chirp on and on here on Signal Fire about the power of imagination, hell I just wrote an entire article on it LAST WEEK and talked about The Neverending Story and how it’s literally imagination that built Fantasia, but then it dawned on me: We don’t need imagination to rebuild just Fantasia, we need it to save THIS world, THIS earth, THIS time.
I’m here, screaming at the top of my lungs, for a world in which compassion doesn’t require credentials, that we don’t have to experience the suffering of another to feel it, to care, and where we use imagination as more than just a tool to invent new worlds for new stories, but to create a bridge between lives that might not have anything in common, at all.
I try my hardest to live this way, to empathize not only because I have experienced what I have, but mostly because I haven’t, and imagining it hurts so much. I use that imagination to put myself in their shoes, and then when the world snaps back and I sit where I sit with the privilege I sit with, I fucking ache because to be where they are, sitting with whatever pain or grief, is horrific, and I want to help in any way I can. I empathize without experience, because I believe the most powerful form of understanding comes not from sharing a pain, it comes from a simple decision that someone else’s suffering matters just as much, exactly as much, as our own.
That we are all one thing, and we always have been.
That’s all I wanted to say here, that’s all I wanted to talk about. I just wanted to voice it, put it into the world where it’s real and it’s tangible and it sticks. I wanted to say out loud something simple, that empathy is not just the ability to recognize ourselves in someone else’s suffering, it’s refusing to look away from it even if you can’t. I believe, fully, that people want to be people that are capable of compassion beyond their own personal experience, and I hope you feel the same, I want you to believe the same.
Have the courage to find what isn’t yours, the ache, the weight, the sorrow, the grief, and hold it like it’s yours. To embrace another’s hurt, though you cannot understand it.
I think of those who huddle from bomb and missile, those who have lost someone to violence, and though I’ve never been there, never felt that stinging ache, I sit with it in my imagination until it burns, until it hurts, and that hurting tells me every truth.
I love you all.
Be good.
