Empathy 11.23.2015

I feel empathy for Parisians and their feelings of fear and unease from the overwhelming threat to their sense of safety.

I feel empathy for Beiruters and Nigerians who are enduring equal degrees of pain, anger and disruption as Parisians, but with less worldwide media acknowledgment.

I feel empathy for the hundreds of thousands of refugees, who have no country they can call their own, no community left, no home, and nowhere safe to lay their heads each night.

I feel empathy for the students of Yale, University of Missouri, Ithaca and many other colleges who, due to deep and penetrating institutional racism, not only feel less than an equal part of the whole, but also like they have no safe place to call their own.

I feel empathy for the Yale professor who wrote that political correctness was crushing the strength of our character built on critical thinking and reason, and who is attacked for her intellectualization of a sensitive emotional moment.

I feel empathy for the UT Palestinian student whose grandfather was killed and who feels threatened by far-reaching institutionalized US-Israeli relations.

I feel empathy for the Israeli professor threatened by an angry student Palestinian cohort seeking fair representation, justice and restitution.

I feel empathy for Muslims who are raised to love, not hate, and who struggle to secure a global understanding of their culture and way of life in a threatening world that typecasts, distrusts, denounces, and violates them.

I feel empathy for African Americans who collectively feel more and more oppressed as institutional racism and economic pressures cripple their hopes at a fair and equal chance at happiness and joy in their lives and the lives of their children.

I feel empathy for Hispanic Americans who put their heads down and work hard to make ends meet in a new home and country that is antagonistic to immigration and any person of color.

I feel empathy for women who are trying to find their rightful place in a deeply ingrained patriarchal culture that is far too slow in transitioning to a more balanced and egalitarian system.

I feel empathy for all those who are marginalized and threatened because of race and gender and class, and who begin their lives already several steps behind on the ladder.

I feel empathy for the dying dominant male Caucasian class, who feel threatened by the gradual erosion of a long standing dominant western world view that they have benefitted tremendously from, and who struggle to gracefully adjust to massive global shifts in identity.

I feel empathy for all those who feel they are victims in some way — of brutality, bullying, coercion, intimidation, domination and discrimination, of mind or body, whether it be in the real physical world or, more and more, the digital/virtual social world.

I feel empathy for young people today who are seeking a path forward, an identity, and a hopeful future, amidst mass loneliness, dissociation, mediation, climate compromise, and global economic uncertainty.

I feel empathy for conservatives who feel their country, core values, and institutions are being dangerously threatened by a lack of morality, purity, loyalty and responsibility.

I feel empathy for liberals who feel their outlook is the more fair, humane, compassionate, and righteous one, but are living in a world of unchecked injustice and inequality.

And yes, I even feel empathy for the hapless ISIS recruits who have drifted from the communities that failed them, in search of meaning and self-worth, who are brainwashed to hate and kill.

I empathize because I don't know any better way to make it through this messy grand experiment called progress.

The Modern Way

Is this all there is? 
Is this all there is?
Is this all there is?

We follow scripts. We take steps. We set goals. We meet goals. We make more goals. We make excuses for not meeting goals. 

We ignore the nagging feelings of emptiness inside, if we are lucky enough to feel them to begin with. We chase them away with drugs and more drugs and more drugs, until we are so dazed that everything goes by in a blur.

What was nature? we ask.  What were the trees supposed to tell us? Why am I afraid of spiders, and why do they still crawl into my dreams?

We step on blackened gum on the pavement. We step on broken glass, but nothing hurts. We step on wildflowers painted on the street. Our shoes are hard and pointy, and they keep us from the filthy ground.

We wash our hands with alcohol. We paint our faces with cement. We stare into tiny screens, summoning one another in the dark, typing in gutturals, sobbing into tiny messages that never come.

It’s the modern way, they say.  

A tiny voice inside us tells us that it doesn’t have to be this way, but the voice is far too faint, and it doesn’t stand a chance above the other voices that scream at us day after day.

The tiny voice is right. Sort of. We’ve been living in prison for a long time now, so long that we’ve withered, so long that we’ve forgotten what it is to be alive.

But there’s hope. Maybe. We may have forgotten, but our bodies haven’t. Our brains haven’t. Deep inside, we have all the secrets to feeling alive. 

The Happiness Gap

Want to know how people are feeling? Don't ask them. Instead, watch what they do when they think nobody is watching. 

People lie. A lot. We lie to ourselves and to others. We lie when people ask us how we're feeling. We lie when we take surveys. We lie when we give feedback. It's not that we're bad or evil — we have a strong innate bias towards presenting ourselves in the most positive light possible, and this means that we have trouble portraying ourselves accurately.

In the ancestral environment — small egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes — the people we spent time with knew us extremely well. They knew our foibles and missteps, and they stuck with us anyway. Nobody could get away with much lying or distortion — we'd be called out immediately. Our lives are very different today. Our relationships are shallower, more fragmentary. We're not rooted to much. So in our public personas, we project whatever signs and symbols and scripts we can, in order to be seen positively, in order to fill the gaping void that should rightfully be filled with deep unconditional human love and acceptance and closeness. Ironically, the stroking that we get from adopting others' signs and symbols and scripts has the opposite effect than we intend — it leaves us hollow and disconnected, like addicts reliant on our next fix. 

We know that people get depressed by spending time on social media — they are looking at people's best attempts at social desirability, and comparing others' rose-tinted tales to their own cracked and pitted lives. It's hard to stop participating in this game. We're just not wired to do radical honesty very well — we care too much about what others think of us. People happily jump into #100daysofgratitude challenges, but what about #100daysofhonesty? Do you dare? Do you dare reveal how ugly, hungry and dizzy you feel? Do you dare speak of the fatigue that you fight silently day after day? Facebook may lie, but Google autocomplete never does.

It's time to close the happiness gap. It may feel difficult at first, but our long-term sanity depends upon it.