The most precious Resource on Earth isn’t Oil or Water — it’s Empathy.
And it’s declining rapidly.
Empathy, the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes or look at things from a different view point other than our own, helps us to understand when we have upset a friend or to concede we’ve been wrong during an argument. Empathy also enables managers to lead better teams and more recently Service Design agencies use this as part of a larger process to improve the lives of those who are rarely heard.
Allegedly a basic human trait, it seems like the vast majority of people have forgotten or ‘unlearned’ how to use it. Yet it’s a skill that is vital for each and every one of us in order to make sense of the world outside our specific set of circumstances. It help us unpack our ecosystem and makes it less scary to live in it. Empathy lets us dive deep into problems and find solutions for complex scenarios in our societies that we couldn’t otherwise tackle.
Yet, the use of empathy is rapidly declining, growing the distance between ‘us’, people we can understand, and ‘them’, those who appear so utterly different. Because we have buried the ability to truly understand others and discard any fragile attempts as fruitless, those people become foreign, strange… and scary.
Fueled by large scale economic hardship and intense efforts of securitization — the rhetoric of fear that makes us afraid of near on everything and has helped push through unpopular and often times controversial legislation — we are no longer interested in how other people feel, go about their lives, make it through. Why, we’ve got our own things to worry about!
Our inability or unwillingness to understand and advocate for life choices other than our own is the single biggest factor shaping the demise of our civilization. It’s the source of conflict, of hatred and fear. It’s the reason for tons of bad policy choices that leaders globally are forcing through, seriously affecting the lives of the most vulnerable in our societies while wasting vast sums of tax payer money. At best, they take a stab in the dark and get lucky.
Our growing ineptitude to co-exist is so obvious it hurts:
Refugees are demonized for attempting to land on our shores, never mind having left everything, literally everything behind, clamoring on the thin thread of hope that they may escape despair and suffering and not just live pain free but live and eventually die a dignified death. Is this not the essence of human strive? 100 years ago, the same act was branded heroism. In the 50s we needed them to (re)build our countries. The US, Australia and New Zealand are founded on immigration, they would not exist in their modern form, wasn’t it for ‘boat people’.
Homeless people are seen as a ‘plague’. They are perceived as dirty and, frankly they make the rest of us look bad. They are begging for food and money and remind us constantly of a situation we don’t want to be associated with. But what drives someone to sleep on the streets? Choosing to forego safety and access to sanitary facilities when in the western world most people got a right to a roof over their heads? What is it about the way we organize our societies that fosters these choices? What are the problems that aren’t addressed?
Those ‘benefit bludgers’. This group of people who lazily waste the day away, burning through hard earned tax dollars and abusing their families. Taking one hand-out after another. The way beneficiaries are described in popular media is appalling and helps fuel the flame of animosity. When have they stopped being human and started becoming a thing? Of all those remaining hard working tax payers, who has made the effort to speak to a beneficiary? To try and understand what drove individuals and entire families into this situation. What does it mean to ask the state for money, and leave no sheet of your private life unturned to prove you need it? How does it feel shopping groceries with food stamps, where everybody in your can see you are one of those people? Is the system our governments are operating actually solving problems or just masking human despair? Are working families and pensioners on benefits just as undesirable because they require support? Are our societies failing people? If so, why and how can we fix it?
But the lack of empathy goes further. Not only have our fellow humans apparently become too cryptic to understand, it seems like the environment is just as unworthy of our empathy.
When we throw a bottle cap in the sea or leave our ice cream wrapper behind we ignore the fact that we are creating damage to an ecosystem that is more complex than our scientists have yet been able to explore. Nature is supposed to succeed us, our own children and other people’s families who we will never know. We extract natural resources like there is no tomorrow, we destroy natural habitats and make entire species go extinct but are baffled that we don’t have enough rain to grow the grass necessary to sustain our precious livestock industries. Coastal areas are flooded, earthquakes destroy cities and take our loved ones. We are moaning about traffic and congestion and decreasing quality of life. What is happening to the world around us and how is it related to the ways we choose to live?
If there is one thing to teach our children or invest into during our next spending spree in bettering ourselves (like the gym memberships we never use or the personal coach who’s working on our communication skills) is empathy. Let’s engage in a bit of brain acrobatics and expose ourselves to a different set of circumstances. Even better, let’s go out there and live some of that otherness for an hour or two. Let’s challenge our preconceptions around what it means not to have a home to go to, not to be invited for an interview because the HR manager cannot pronounce our names, to not be able to go to the toilet in private, to fear for our lives because of our skin color, beliefs, because of the person we love or because we spoke our mind.
It takes commitment to leave our own assumptions behind and engage with someone ‘different’ completely. We don’t need to donate to charity to make a difference (though of course that helps). Truly empathizing with others is one of the rarest gestures today, yet is more impactful than a feel-good $5 donation. Empathy creates peace, understanding and acceptance of otherness. It enables us to be grateful for what we’ve got and lets us learn from each other to make our lives better.
The greatest challenge we are facing as humans today is to figure out how we might relearn to see through the eyes of others, for the ability to empathize is prerequisite to solving the problems that makes us struggle individually and collectively as people every single day.
