Empathy vs Sympathy

Friends!

So many emotions running through my system this week.

I feel every day like I am playing an emotional Wack-a-Mole game. You have all played the game at some amusement park.

I keep finding promising silver linings. Some good emotions to hang on to. Like the beautiful summer weather, the time we spend with our children and grandchildren, the time not on airplanes and the many daily reminders of the goodness of humans all around. Also the hope that all the problems that have become more visible is building the right collective resolve to design sustainable solutions to fix them. I have a sense that more and more people feel we can and must be better than THIS.

But then, at the same time, this other ugly and more evil twin sister of humanity pops up. The mean spirited politicization of just about everything. The competing narratives that cleverly and loudly amplify the exact opposite versions of truth that confuses me and so many others. Just one Covid example. If you believe in herd immunity as the most reasonable way to get over Covid, is growth in cases then not a necessary path to normalcy? Yes, if case fatality rates are falling with increased cases and NO, if they are not. Truth? Well it depends on what you believe, which extrapolations you assume, whether COVID immunity behaves similarly to other known viruses in our past, and how you weigh the costs of action vs inaction and the direct vs opportunity costs. This requires a nuanced, reasonable type of conversation that we are incapable of having which leads us to extreme measures on either side. Too complicated for our current conversational climate to handle. Who and what to believe is almost impossible to determine.

So what to do?

I turn off most of the noise. Try to not click on all the bait out there. They tend to lead me astray and to a place of extreme points of view. Those are never that helpful. I try to listen to long-form podcasts or read articles with conversations that try their best to peel the layers of our complexities without judging our options one way or the other. I search for voices, places and spaces where people are painting the truth in gray. Which (in case anyone forgot…) is a mix of black AND white.

One such voice and conversation this week inspired me to think more about Empathy vs Sympathy. At first glance they might feel they are one of the same kind of feeling or attitude. But listening first to Brené Brown’s podcast (below) and then reading up some more I learned and became more aware of important distinctions between them.

This might sound like semantics only. But stay with me. Words do matter. They signify our intentions and ultimately our actions.

I know we all feel down and miserable at times. We lose our confidence. We might even lose our hope. Bad things happens to everyone in every life. Unfortunately, bad things aren’t equally or evenly distributed, nor in time neither among people. But by and large, you can’t walk on this earth without occasionally being hit very hard by something that affects you in significant ways. And ultimately we all face the same fate. Perhaps this is the ultimate equalizer. No one survives life. It’s one of the great contrasts of anything living. Anything living also is anything dying. Paolo Coelho once said that: We live as we were never going to die and we die as we had never lived.

So when you are down. When you are blue. Or when someone you care about is going through a challenging time. How do you feel? Sometimes we are disappointed? Sometimes we feel shame? Sometimes we feel we let other people down (that’s the worst one to me). And sometimes we are so down that we start feeling self-pity. The feeling of empathy and compassion is the place we go to when we try to imagine and connect to someone else’s misery. It’s a very important aspect of our humanity. To be able to relate. To show up. To stand in rain or sunshine with your brothers and sisters. Or as we commit to when we get married. For better or for worse.

But something we all have to watch out for is that subtle difference when our sense of defeat is so overpowering that we lose our action oriented nature. When we can’t find a new door to walk through. When we simply don’t know what to do. That’s where we start to flirt with the feeling of self-pity. And for all of us that have visited that place, it’s not a particularly proactive place to be. It’s where optimism, innovation, constructiveness goes to die. And when you are there for too long (an occasional visit for short periods is both human and natural) you tend to invite “others” to keep you company and to ultimately find solutions for you. This is where calls for sympathy might not be as helpful as we think. It risks being patronizing and “self-fulfilling”. It creates a license to stay vs agency to leave.

Some of you might find that this is splitting hairs. A semantic quibble. But I don’t think it is. I think our collective empathy or compassion matters a great deal. We have to increase and show more of it. Our public square is currently poisoned or at least confused by a lack of strong connective tissue. The threads we need in order to weave a strong communal tapestry are being thinned out by a lack of diverse perspectives and therefore inability to relate. However, our empathy must never replace the importance of agency and self-directed solutions. As the famous proverb states: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Empathy is about our commitment to the teaching of fishing. Sympathy might be more akin to handing out fish.

In our current time, we certainly need to amplify empathy. But let’s make sure our concern for others is promoting, enabling, and ultimately is in support of the proper agency for change.

Have a great week!

Brené Brown is a favorite researcher and writer on the topic of shame and vulnerability. Her now very famous TEDx talk from 2010 with over 48 million views is amazing. I am always inspired by her courage and clarity around navigating our inner emotional landscapes. Below you can listen to a question from Chuck where Brené answers and expands on the difference between empathy and sympathy. I found it very helpful. If you want to listen to the entire episode you can find it here.

That was just a Brené Brown teaser. If you haven’t read her books or watch or listened to more of her you are in for a gift. There is plenty out there to enjoy and learn from. Below I am sharing one of my favorite interviews with her from earlier this year. This from the Tim Ferriss show which I found to be honest, transparent and really humanly inspiring.

Gift of Time

This week I am letting you off the hook only with Brené. She is plenty. Call it empathy! Enjoy.