Empathy

A question has been bothering me for some time now. It is the sort that gnaws at you in the quiet moments. The kind of nebulous idea that keeps you up in the dark, staring at the ceiling trying to find an answer.

I say nebulous, because it really is a fuzzy thing. If I state it as a simple question, the number of caveats will fill the trunk of an old Buick. At best I can describe the boundaries of the idea. The edges of what is bothering me.

This all started while I was thinking about how to convey cultural experiences. How does one person explain what it means to be them to another person? Is that even possible? Or, rather, if it is possible, does it have a cap as to how much of that experience can truly be conveyed?

I actually think about this a lot. America is treated as a monoculture. By politicians. By corporate leaders. By journalists. You know, the ruling class the revolution was fought to install.

To be fair, we also do it to ourselves. Look at all the bullshit mythology about Gen X. How many bad think pieces have you seen about how awesome it was to drink out of hoses? How many TikTok or Instagram reals have passed your eyes of some old head talking about running the streets until the lights came on?

Again. Bullshit. The depiction is entirely suburban and ignores the myriad of other lived experiences. Another monoculture mono-myth that gives up nuance for expediency.

And even if the mono-myth experience was true, nothing about what I am being told adequately conveys the feeling of that experience. How do you connect the dots between a lived experience of one person with the different lived experience of another? How do you do that when you only know half of that equation?

This gnaws at me even more right now. I am watching in real time the government of this country attack two of its own cities. I'm one of those tapped into the alternate news types, so I am actually seeing things. I am connecting experiences of others to my own and wrestling with them.

But I know I am more an exception than a rule. I know most people are getting news from shittier channels of information. Are they able to translate the lived experiences of the people on the ground into their own? Are those channels even trying to do that for people?

Probably not. But they should be.

I think that is somewhere at the heart of the cloud of what I am struggling with. We talk about empathy as a purely feeling oriented pursuit. We conflate it with sympathy constantly and tie it up with moments of loss and grief almost exclusively.

It's kinda fucking weird that we do that.

In reality, empathy is cultural connections as much as it is emotional. How does my lived experience match yours? How do you and I find common ground in that? How does that shared space allow us to understand each other better? How do we adopt a bit from each other in the process and come closer together?

I saw a post on Bluesky yesterday about how a person who is from the East coast who now lives in Chicago wishes they could convey to their friends in NYC and DC how very angry "normies" in the Midwest are right now. I wish I knew the secret sauce. That writer is friends who are journalists.

None of this closes the circle for me.

There are tactile pieces missing. I can't connect you to the importance of poppy seed to who I am without that taste on your lips. You won't be able to understand why I am never satisfied with the rye bread at restaurants unless you smelled it fresh in our bakery that no longer exists. How can you know where I come from if you don't know what it feels like to run your fingers over old polished wood carvings?

We can describe these things to one another and hope we connect dots. It requires work and nuance. Effort is needed on both parties. It is an all in sort of situation.

Maybe this is all a fools errand.

Everything I write. Everything I create is trying to answer this nebulous question. In my head is a world of cultures filled with food and songs and traditions. I keep trying to get them out.

Why is it so hard to make the human experience make sense to humans?

I guess that is the question. Distilled down to spirit form. Raw and ready to be infused with flavor. With nuance.

I don't have an answer. I have a lot of answers to that question. I guess that is the point of this. There isn't really one answer. There is the wrestling with the question to arrive at the many, many answers to a complicated question.

If the answer was simple, we wouldn't be in this fucking mess.