An Entirely Other Day: The Empathy Vacuum

But we — the majority of us — apparently do not need help remembering to text our significant other. (Or — cough — think we don’t.)

And that’s the difference, isn’t it? What we can imagine ourselves doing, or needing, or wanting. Those people who don’t need the help feel free to judge those who do.

They judge us by our failures and not our desire to improve. They judge us by our tools and not what we can accomplish with them. They judge us by their own standards, without a breath given to the possibility that a different perspective might exist.

Which is pretty much the Internet in a nutshell, isn’t it? Exposed to the entire spectrum of human enthusiasms, it’s basically impossible not to judge. Our empathy overloads and gives up and we sit, staring at the screen aghast, that somebody, somewhere might actually believe that what they’re doing is OK, is acceptable, is even appropriate.

Everybody is somebody else’s monster.

At one time it was easy for me to not think that there’ll be another person on the other side of what I’m writing — be that a text message, an email, a Facebook status update, or a post here…be it a single human reading or a group.

But…I’ve witnessed (and been a party to) careless words smashing through lives though and those kind of hurts can last forever. Some are simply impossible to forget.

#advancedsoul