Empathy’s Pseudo Popularity Is Still An Opportunity

Are we ready to make the effort to stop being so egocentric?

a cat with satellite-dish ears listens to a man standing a vast distance from it, surreal, sleek, minimal, digital art — by DALL·E

Empathy has recently become one of these words everyone wants to be associated with. It feels as if the terms we use in our daily speech form a personal SEO of sorts: as though our brain cells occupied with first impressions sent their nano crawlers to detect words we like and dislike. Perhaps their functionality is not so different from my bizarre image. Indeed, in our current hyperconnected and hyper-informed state, we will find every excuse to use a shortcut. After all, skimming texts must be a prelude to skimming conversations. I digress.

Regardless of how fancy a concept it has become, we cannot deny empathy is essential for building any meaningful relationship and community. However, empathy isn’t a term we can simply throw into a conversation like a click on a cookie policy acceptance button. Empathy requires genuine effort and time: listening actively to someone means not listening to anything else that may be happening in our busy reality in addition to — oh dear — not talking for a significant amount of time.

The idea of empathy is more popular than ever before, but I suspect its practice is at average levels, if not at a historical low. After all, we have never had as much opportunity to be…