We are social beings- meaning if more people like us or even react somewhat positively we feel gratified. This latent hunger for others who are like you drives many of our decisions- shopping at malls, watching or listening to popular shows or games, trying to make sense of fashion trends or more basic ones like treating the females as the "fairer sex" or disliking fat people. Empathy is the balance. It makes us "relate" to others, thus framing our sense of good and bad.
Just my thoughts triggered by your writings.
Keep Steemin!!
We will have an avalanche of thoughts then, because now yours have unleashed mine.
Maybe we can identify with others in these types of aspects or themes. But would this really be Empathy?
The aspects that give the "weight-value" to our conflicts are totally subjective.
We would have to learn about the experiences of that obese woman and all the rejections she suffered during her adolescence so that she could understand why she cries every night and eats gallons of ice cream in front of the TV.
Or perhaps having a broad general culture, like our criteria, having taken advantage in a sensitive way and spiritual growth our experiences, we may have developed the necessary sensitivity to put ourselves in the place of the other and feel what the other feels.
In the same way I think you're right when you say that in principle it allows us "to relate" to others.