Sometimes when I hear the older generations complain about kids now, I can’t help but feel a little offended. Not so long ago, I was the kid they were complaining about and to be completely honest, I never thought we were that bad. Although the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize that there is one area in which I truly do understand and see their reason for complaining about us. This area is our lack of empathy.
I look around me, and I often feel like my life is not so different from those I see. I go to school and work, I go out with my friends, I watch Netflix and scroll through Instagram. From the outside, I feel like I fit in. Yet, a part of me feels entirely different as well. I constantly feel like I’m looking at those I care about and absorbing their emotions.
Maybe it is through writing that I learned to put myself into another’s shoes, after all, that is how you create the world outside of your own. Perhaps it’s from all the reading I do, as it has allowed me to learn to lose myself in any world that is laid out in front of me, despite how different it is from my own. In the end, I’m not entirely sure where it came from. All I know is that I don’t ever want to be the kind of person who doesn’t see the people around me, and I mean really see them.
Having empathy sounds a lot nicer than it really feels. It makes you look like this wonderful person who cares about everyone around you. However, this also means carrying the weight of other’s burdens, feeling their pain like you do your own, and letting your own mental health slide simply because theirs is. It sucks the energy from you and sometimes makes it difficult to find time and patience to face your own life and problems.
Perhaps, the world we live in, where mental health awareness is so immensely essential, we have finally come to realize that protecting ourselves is important. This is an argument I have no issue with. However, what I can’t understand is why we haven’t come to find a happy medium.
Why can’t we live in a world where it’s okay to protect yourself and those around you?
I see illness and death strike down numerous people in my community, and less and less young people stand up to face it. What they don’t realize is that if they don’t stand strong for others, then how can they expect others to stand strong for them when their time comes. Life will always, always be easier when fought together. My generation, although unique and strong, hasn’t learned that lesson yet.
Independence is necessary, but it has a time and a place. We have spent so much time fighting for the right to do things on our own terms, that we forgot what it means to help the person next to us. One day life won’t be so easy for some of us, and when we need help we will look around and no one will be there. Maybe a few older members of our family or community, but not the people we expect. While I’m proud to be a part of my generation, there are many, many ways in which we have excelled and grown beyond our years. All I ask is that next time you fight a battle, hold hands with the person next to you because god knows they’re fighting a battle of their own.
Featured Image via Pexels
You may want to start with compassion before you move to empathy. Compassion is just coming alongside someone, as they are in their problem or situation. You don’t share their problem, but you are sorry they are in it and willing to even be silent as you are with them. You feel for them, rather than feel with them. Empathy is more like joining in the pain another feels and making your own expression of understanding within that shared experience. We might feel empathy with an artist in their expression, joining in that expression. Compassion is more like true companionship, a deep friendship even, who knows their friend is in pain and seeks to come alongside, maybe to help, but maybe also to just be there.
If you look at human history and evolution you will see a much different picture. Globally violence is lower than it has ever been before. Humans were once a very brutish animal that killed strangers on sight. Throughout our evolution we have under gone a process of self domestication, which means we have become far more docile and even tempered than other primates. This evolution is continuing to this day, people are constantly becoming calmer, more empathetic, and easier to get along with. This doesn’t make an exciting news story though. It’s easy to get caught up in only seeing the bad things in the world when we are constantly faced with social media, 24 hour news, and negative political and cultural commentary, but the reality is that what is happening to humanity is amazing. It’s unprecedented to see an animal that is both highly intelligent and highly empathetic in their everyday interactions, even peaceful bonobos have 10 times the amount of reactive violence than any human group on earth, and one needs only look at how violent the world was a couple centuries ago to see how much we have changed, and in a remarkably short amount of time by evolutionary standards. We have every reason to be grateful and optimistic, we inhabit a uniquely kind and empathetic corner of the world.
Gosh ………….. as a functioning human, empathy is all that matters. If you don’t have empathy, you are psychopath.