Today I Learned

A parasite keeps reminding you it’s there until it (or you) is destroyed.

Yeah I wish we could filter comments as well.

Reading the page, it doesn't sound like he's against empathy at all. He's specifically against making decisions based on "feels" and targeting empathy specifically because he seems to believe it's a tool often misused.

For a second I was expecting something akin to Radical Candor's "ruinous empathy" which has been used an excuse by managers the world over to justify their inherent lack of any empathy for the people around them.

Seems like an interesting read, adding it to my list. Thanks.

I got caught up on the term 'empathy for self.' I haven't read the book, but I visited the link and couldn't get past what I felt was a tragically flawed oxymoron. But maybe that's a flaw with the Wikipedia article and not the source material, so I'll endeavor to seek out the book at some point to learn more.

The opposite I feel, we are stronger as a group and my instinct when shit hits the fan is to make sure everyone involved is ok and ready to face the challenge together

That's the irony of it. I'm by no means a scholar of Thich Nhat Hanh, but I remember reading an account from his early life as a Vietnamese monk during the conflict with imperial France in which he had basically nothing and was himself barely surviving, but still found a way to feel peace and express compassion for a young French soldier suffering from malaria who desperately raided the monastery at gunpoint.

My parents were fucking great. Not the best but damn it they did the best they could with what they were handed. I can see how it could be considered a privilege.

Not everyone has good parents

A history of trauma is more common among people who refuse to harm animals on the basis of empathy (as opposed to being plant based for their health or the environment or something) than among the general population. I suspect that empathy is innate. I suspect that people who have experienced trauma have less capacity to ignore, interfere with, and override their empathy.

Our shitty education system makes kids associate reading a book with homework, and many adults don't outgrow that association

fwiw, I didn't read 0-17 for fun because reading was homework and fuck doing what you tell me.

I started reading in my 20s. Hopefully others too.

I can't say it was intentional. I never set out to become more empathetic. It was just that, as I began to navigate the world on my own, I realized how selfish and wrong was my thinking about the world and the people i met.

I learned that eating animals was a major cause of the climate catastrophe shortly after moving from my patents house, and so I became vegetarian and many of my friends were vegan. My initial motivation for this was mostly still selfish, since its still in my personal interest to avoid climate catastrophe. But obviously many of my peers were veg for more empathetic reasons.

Also at Uni many of my friends were poorer than me. So being exposed to poor vegan friends showed me a lot of what I wasn't taught by my parents (empathy).

And then I went traveling, and I was amazed at how kind most strangers I met were. We're taught to live in fear and that others want to hurt us, but I found most strangers wanted to help. And those who have less generally give more than rich folks.

As for work, I've worked as a sysadmin. It can be high stress when things break and you're called-in to fix it. Its important to have a cool head. I've also done a lot of trekking, sometimes in sketchy situation. I think the leader attribute might be more my nature, whereas empathy was learned (or, maybe, being a selfish asshole was unlearned)