this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
778 points (99.0% liked)
me_irl
7711 readers
3080 users here now
All posts need to have the same title: me_irl it is allowed to use an emoji instead of the underscore _
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have never heard a person talk about empathy introspectively. Invariably it has been about how someone else needs to be more empathetic, and almost always, the speaker would hypothetically be the beneficiary of this increased empathy.
Happens more often than you might think, but rarely in online discourse or Internet blowharding.
yep. it's weaponized and used to shame people into agreement.
people also don't have general empathy, they have it for specific other persons they identify with and they tend to totally lack it for those they don't identify with.
people also generally mean 'feel bad for' when they use the term. true empathy is more about being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and relate to their experience, it's not an abstraction. empathy doesn't make you feel bad, it helps you understand others experiences... but it's not used that way colloquially and definitely not that way on the internet.
the thing people really do when they go on about empathy, is pity. and when they demand empathy for themselves, they are demanding pity for themselves.
People in the west need to adopt more Buddhist language. One facet of empathy often overlooked is sympathetic or appreciative joy, also known as mudita, one of the four brahma viharas. Empathy doesn't always have to be about negatives, and mudita is a good inoculant against envy.
people in the west don't do that. they warp eastern beliefs to suite themselves, and turn buddism into an exercise of ego-building, rather than ego-minimizing that is supposed to be. we are insanely ego-centric and we distort any belief system we encounter to fuel that egocentrism.
It's why the west like Freud so much, but not so much Jung. Because Jung was about collectivist ideas, and Freud was all about our struggles with ourselves and our struggles as individuals against other individuals.