Laws of Empathy: What I learned after doing 25 user interviews in 2 weeks
There is something we get really wrong about how we empathize with others.
Alright y‘all, I was hired by a pretty large tech company to help design a new “thing” for people working remotely. The project was running late, and the deadlines immutable, so I had to squeeze the assigned twenty five interviews into the shortest time possible. I had just enough time to do about two a day, so I could do it over two weeks.
The result was that by the second week I was miserable and angry, nearly all of the time. Unfortunately, my friends and family were taking the brunt of it. They were confused why I was mad at them, and I was confused also.
Turns out I had no idea how empathy actually works, even though I was trained in how to do it and I was getting paid to do user research and empathize with people professionally.
What I learned was that empathy is not a skill.
Empathy is a limited resource that is governed by really weird laws of physics. To repeat, you don’t do empathy, you use it. Empathy is not a verb, it is a strange noun.
The first law of empathy is that empathy is finite.
“I think the hardest part is that I miss my family. I’ll call them, and facetime them; and actually I can control the Google Home all the way from here! One time I was able to get the thing to yell at my kids all over the house hahaha.”
I was interviewing a man named Bernie. Bernie is a black man from Virginia and he speaks with a heavy Jamaican accent. He used to manage a team of physical therapists in an old folks home, but in the early days of COVID-19, he decided he couldn’t handle the death he was seeing every day. This was back when most people in the US didn’t realize how serious the pandemic would become.
So he drove his car down to Texas to follow a lead on a new job. He wanted to start a new life for his family (a wife and two daughters), and he took a trip there to explore his options. But after looking at a few potential new jobs, Bernie got sick from COVID-19 and he has been spending the last few weeks in isolation, miles and miles away from his family.
Bernie was fascinating. He was also my twenty-something-th interview. I had lost track of everything long ago.
As much as I wanted to empathize and understand Bernie, I was completely and unexpectedly burnt out. Honestly, I was just sitting at home, in my chair, in front of a laptop, talking to someone. I did not understand why I was burnt out.
This brings me to the first law of empathy. Bernie was very easy to speak to, had incredible life experiences, yet I could not connect with him. I had no empathy to give, but my job demanded I give more. That is the twist. I was taught that empathy is a skill you do, but really it is a resource that you give. If you keep giving, eventually you can run out.
The second law of empathy is that empathy can be drained and refilled.
Imagine you have this cup, and it is full of empathy which is like water.
This is your cup so you drink from it. This is self-empathy (or as wikipedia calls it self-compassion). But sometimes people come along and you give empathy to them too. In my case the big tech company asked me to give some empathy to people like Bernie. And if you keep giving, eventually it can run out.
When your cup is empty then this is really bad news. This is called being “under resourced.” People become confused, angry, and in a lot of inner turmoil. You can recognize people who are under resourced quickly because they are stuck on a negative emotion, and more likely than not to are yelling at you or are completely dissociated.
The good news is that you can refill this cup. The way to do this is to practice self-care and to do more of the things that give you energy. Not just sleeping and eating, but to do the things that tickle that inner spark. It’s become trendy recently to do meditation, and there is a lot of literature that says it works. It does not need to be meditation if that is not your jam.
I noticed that when my cup was empty, I was defensive and aggressive. After the two weeks were over, and Zoom was turned off, I noticed myself becoming better. My cup was slowly filling back up, in theory because I didn’t have to give any more of it up.
The third law of empathy is that you can only give empathy if your cup is overflowing.
The part I missed over the two weeks is that I completely ignored the life giving activities I normally relied on. I took all that “fun stuff” for granted. And when my cup became totally drained, I became drained too and started to take it out on the people around me. Work became unproductive and life became bleak.
In his book, Loving Conflict, Max Rivers says that you can only give empathy healthfully when you have an over abundance of it. Max Rivers works as a practitioner of Non Violent Communication and has worked to mediate some really incredible conflicts.
At the end of the two weeks, I learned that you cannot do empathy. You have to do all of the other stuff that makes giving away empathy possible. Empathy runs out otherwise.
Imagine how much easier it is to be curious about someone, when you feel alive, connected, inspired, and “resourced.” That is the feeling of overflowing with empathy.
There is a deeper discussion here about self-care and empathy in different cultures. In some places people are expected to give empathy for their professions, because traditions demand it, or a higher authority expects it. In some parts of the world self-care is a selfish indulgence. In the US, providing empathy is usually gendered; women are usually expected to give it away, and men get a free pass. All of these things around the world add up to create dangerous situations for people and making connection hard work.
Empathy is a difficult subject, and the circumstances that make it difficult are often ignored.
I hope this perspective on empathy ends up helping you connect to someone new in some way.
