Empathy Is Bullshit

The word comes up more often than it should. Somehow it demonstrates the best of the human experience, a pivot to distinguish oneself from the “senseless crowd”. Heck, It almost sounds like a superpower. Empathy is defined more or less as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another “entity”. Having spent some decades on this planet, I seriously doubt that empathy ever existed. More or less, the word is nothing but a social meme.

If we could dissect a human brain down to the very basic fundamentals, we would get very disappointed. A human being is basically an instinct-based machine put through a repeater program. More or less, what makes us, well us, is a squeezed blob on neural interfaces that repeat the same actions over and over again. You see, the brain, instead of replacing obsolete structures, it has been building upon itself for hundreds of thousands of years, over and over again.

This is like trying to build a 500 meter skyscraper on top of a stone-age hut, using the same old materials. This is how you get priests glancing at massive cleavages as they pass by. This is also how you get anxiety and panic attacks over things like “x person not liking you”. This is also how you get humans to believe in a plethora of concepts that do not exist.

We see another human crying but we don’t feel sad. We rather try to guess what is going on, trying to make ourselves feel sad so that we won’t appear as insensitive assholes. Same thing applies to someone that has recently lost their leg. We have no idea what losing a leg feels like but we try to say culturally crafted words like “I am sorry” so we can make the situation more bearable. If you think you are indeed feeling sad because you know that person well, think again. Have you ever been a victim of infectious laughter? Well, similar concept applies here. Human emotions and perceptions are extremely gullible to suggestion and we just love giving in.

Ironically enough, the word empathy has become synonymous with some kind of higher state in the overall human experience. You watch a child dying in Africa so you decide to upvote that post on facebook and send 10 dollars a month. These actions though don’t make you empathic. They rather salvage a guilt trip, and in reality, aid to make this world a much shittier place.

People like to believe that their projections about the mental state of another human being is indeed accurate. For real though. How many stop and think how a starving child would feel with a mere $10 a month? Well, try to imagine how you would feel if you were dying on a hospital bed, screaming for help and someone came along to give you a pedicure. This is exactly what empathy does to most people. We believe we are doing something but really we are doing nothing. At best we are just fulfilling a social norm, earning some social kudos, so that we can continue our lives unburdened.

Evolution has designed us specifically not to feel empathy. If we did actually feel all the feelings of our fellow human beings accurately, we would all commit suicide before the age of 5. We would have gone extinct already. Here is the thing. Life, no matter how you would like to sugar coat it, is mostly pain and suffering. This is why everybody chases the memes of “happiness”, “success” and of course the ultimate troll meme, “the afterlife”. We have constructed such words in order to cope with the gaping hole of our existential dread. This is why these words exist in every book whether it is about business, religion or personal development. They are the cement of our elusive narrative.

There is a very specific number of humans we can give a fuck about and this is limited often to close family and friends. Our mental skyscraper, you know, the one that has been build upon a hut, cannot grasp 7.5 billion people — yet alone their complicated and intricate lives and experiences. A mother might watch her teenage child growing up suffering from all kinds of situations. She knows her child is in pain but she cannot help because she is not him. She physically cannot be empathic even if she desires it so much. But hey. Your motivational speaker knows how to unlock your “empathic” power so you can “feel the needs of your customer” right?

The wide use of “empathy” is a sign that our civilization is immature. We are still stuck on concepts that sooth our shortcomings because we cannot bear the truth of accepting the harshness that comes along with the human experience. Empathy is nothing more than a cheap cheat in our attempt to reach out. The sooner we realize this the faster we can get real and move forward.