Growing into Empathy

How to Change Minds. Including Your Own.

Today I’m meditating on denial. You’re welcome to join me. Increasingly, I think it defines the world around us like little else.

One of the most striking things I see daily:

Old people – especially the more powerful and privileged – just cannot believe just how dire young people’s prospect are. They simply refuse to believe it. Recoil. Eject. Idea purged from mind.

Young people – unless something changes radically in the very near future – won’t enjoy careers, income growth. Thus, no savings. Thus, no mortgages. Thus, no retirement. Thus, ill health and shorter life expectancies. Thus, poorer relationships. They will have a profoundly impoverished quality of life compared to both their patents – and their potential. Shorter, meaner, nastier, more brutal.

This Great Depression for the young is not an opinion. It’s simply a fact. It’s already true for the average young person – and thus true for the majority of them.

But many old people simply can’t process it. Impossible! They cry, when you or I try to explain it to them. How can there be no good jobs…retirements…opportunities? It just doesn’t square with their lived reality. It defies their mental models of the world.

We live in different worlds today. Our beliefs dictate our realities. Left and right, rich and poor. And old and young. We don’t live the same truths anymore, so we don’t hold the same beliefs about what is.

And so this is an age of denial. We deny not just climate change, but economic stagnation, political extremism, cultural decay, social decline. But these are not just facts. They’re like diseases: they will only get worse the more we deny them.

So how do we find common ground? We can try to debate rationally, to use facts. But logic never won a debate in the long history of humanity. A majority of conservatives still don’t believe in climate change…while Miami’s beginning to drown.

The key is empathy. Not just for our fellow sufferers. Our allies. But even for our adversaries, opponents, maybe even persecutors. We cannot hope to gain their understanding until we understand them.

In empathy, we gain the greatest gifts. Humility, wisdom, courage, truth. A truer understanding of what their life is and why it matters. We connect and we transcend.

The old don’t understand the young. So perhaps the young must understand why.

Whenever we wish to solve the problem of denial, we must begin not with outrage. The toxic waste of the Internet age, corroding our spirits and societies. But with sympathy, even for our adversaries, which may, in time, with a measure of grace, become empathy.

Logic doesn’t change minds. Empathy changes possibilities. Which, sometimes, changes reasons for living and loving.