EMPATHY NEEDS A HUG

Feeling for others can tear you to bits, but in the end, it makes you whole.

Hi good folks,

I hope you are doing OK, but sadly I'm pretty sure that you're not. I had nothing to say about my usual topics last week, and this is just a short one.

I gingerly opened Instagram a few days ago, and amongst the horrifying headlines and images from Israel and Gaza, and the cyber bombs thrown by keyboard warriors, I saw a post of a story by writer Xochitl Gonzalez in The Atlantic. It was titled, simply, ‘What Happened to Empathy?’

I really don’t know. I don’t know where it’s gone in a week where Israeli citizens are murdered and abducted, and where the innocent civilian population of Gaza now faces an unspeakable humanitarian disaster. I don’t know where it’s gone when Australia, in a referendum, votes against giving a voice to its First Nations People in the constitution. (It was quite literally the least we could do, and 62% of us didn’t). I don’t know where it’s gone when immigrants bussed to New York City sell candy on the subway with babies on their backs, and people complain.

Gonzalez writes: “Empathy is cultivated through interactions with people we don’t know well, those glimpses into other interior worlds. We have, over the past two decades—slowly and then quickly—“optimized” other people out of our lives. One app at a time, we’ve greatly reduced our need to casually engage with anyone we don’t know—or even to meaningfully engage with those we do.”

And I understand this, I do. I know how it feels when the world is too big and too messy, and you just want to shrink back under your blanket, to the unchallenging security familiarity brings. I know how it feels when you walk past homeless people on the street and just keep moving. When you want to shut off the news. It’s OK, more than necessary, to take care of yourself: the problem is when everybody else starts to get filtered out.

Gonzalez continues: “We have manicured out of our lives and our feeds and our day-to-day existence the need for any and all interactions with anyone who has not been hand-picked by us, who is not of the same class or race or political position. We have found more and more ways to avoid engaging with others of our species. And in doing so, we have eroded our empathy.”

But now the universe is crashing in, overwhelming the personal world we’ve so carefully put together. Our safe little structures are on wobbly legs, our hearts are breaking, and we don’t know what to do. I don’t have any revolutionary suggestions apart from to give, be kind and absorb as much of others’ experience as your wee heart can take.

And maybe if you see a young lady with an infant strapped onto her back selling candy on the subway, you might want to give her five bucks. Whether or not you want the candy.