Can We Revive Empathy in Our Selfish World? (2019) \ stacker news ~mostly

Can We Revive Empathy in Our Selfish World? (2019)nautil.us/can-we-revive-empathy-in-our-selfish-world-237400/

2617 sats \ 14 comments \ @elvismercury 3 Mar mostly_harmless

This came up in my notes, and seemed timely.

As cities grow and households shrink, we see more people than ever before, but know fewer of them. Rituals that bring us into regular contact—attending church, participating in team sports, even grocery shopping—have given way to solitary pursuits, often carried out over the Internet. At a corner store, two strangers might make small talk about basketball, school systems, or video games, getting to know all sorts of details about each other. Online, the first thing we encounter about a person is often the thing we’d like least about them, such as an ideology we despise. They are enemies before they have a chance to be people.

[...]

Modern society is built on human connection, and our house is teetering. For the past dozen years, I’ve researched how empathy works and what it does for us. But being a psychologist studying empathy today is like being a climatologist studying the polar ice: Each year we discover more about how valuable it is, just as it recedes all around us. Does it have to be this way?

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1131 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b 4 Mar

For the past four decades, psychologists have measured empathy. The news is not good. Empathy has dwindled steadily, especially in the 21st century. The average person in 2009 was less empathic than 75 percent of people in 1979.

Yikes. If this is the result of us not knowing each other well enough, are we busy knowing something else or are we struggling to know each other through our current screens? The latter seems fixable in the way the author suggests at least - we just need better screens.

By 2050, two-thirds of our species will be urban. Yet we are increasingly isolated. In 1911, about 5 percent of British citizens lived alone; a century later that number was 31 percent. Solo living has risen most among young people—in the United States, ten times as many 18- to 34-year-olds live alone now than in 1950—and in urban centers. More than half of Paris’s and Stockholm’s residents live alone, and in parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles that number is north of 90 percent.

Do we want to live alone? If so, why? If not, what's stopping us?

SN is downstream of me desperately trying to physically live with other people that weren't family, ie coliving without a natural hierarchy or order. It's never been easy to live with friends and acquaintances, so I'd guess families are what's broken now.

195 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury OP 4 Mar

Do we want to live alone? If so, why? If not, what's stopping us?

It's extra-sinister because I think people have a sense that they do want to live alone; except that every process that defines us as social primates screams out that it's a terrible idea. And yet we are strangers to ourselves, and many people don't introspect properly and find out what they really want, for a more meaningful definition of really want.

SN is downstream of me desperately trying to physically live with other people that weren't family, ie coliving without a natural hierarchy or order.

Is it working out like you'd hoped?

I work remotely, and twice this weekend I've had a conversation that had the shape of: "Ten years ago being able to work my job from whatever geography I wanted, at whatever time I wanted, would have felt like the most absurd and indulgent fantasy. Now it's my actual life, and I mostly hate it."

Getting what you want is a very powerful drug. The consequences of that are an equally strong but very different drug.

1290 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 4 Mar

I think people have a sense that they do want to live alone

We have good friends who are headed for divorce, because one of them expressed that desire and couldn't put the toothpaste back in the tube, so to speak. Now his life is unraveling and his family is falling apart.

My wife and I talk about this all the time. In unshackling ourselves from oppressive cultural expectations, we removed the mechanism that guided people into lives that were more or less fulfilling, most of the time, for most people.

The average person in 2009 was less empathic than 75 percent of people in 1979.

I hadn't heard about the empathy research, but it certainly tracks. I often think about the related issue of intolerance. When we valued family, we not only tolerated but loved people who were very different from us. Now people just excommunicate relatives they disagree with.

And I'm not just sitting up on my cloud of judgement handing down lessons to all the sinners. I also take the route of avoiding family members who I don't really like, but I at least know that in a better society we'd figure out how to be closer.

290 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 4 Mar

Is it working out like you'd hoped?

I was mostly curious if it could work, I'm still curious if it can, and I hope it does. :)

I think people have a sense that they do want to live alone

I think we know the costs of living with others and we've either forgotten the benefit or never experienced them. It reminds me of @Undisciplined's great inequality summarizing my thoughts on the homeless problem:

MB_Homeless - MC_Homeless > MB_Housed - MC_Housed MB: Marginal Benefit MC: Marginal Cost

Maybe this kind of thing needs an apparentness factor, as in marginal benefit should be apparent marginal benefit, because it seems like perceptions could play some part. Like, maybe our eyes are trained away from the benefits of coliving?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 4 Mar

It's that the average peer tends to have an (often times uneducated ) opinion on everything and everyone nowadays, why would I want to engage or even care about that?

218 sats \ 0 replies \ @21millioins 5 Mar

The problem is that you are trying to use tools evolved for 12000 years ago¹ for problems of the XXI century. Spoiler, it won't work.

I think that back in the day a balanced empathy will make us be helpful with those acquaintances and friends when they are in temporary need. But since we sort of knew everybody¹ you know who is in real need because shit happens and who is a careless irresponsible dumbass who got what he/she deserved.

That model doesn't scale, no matter how much of your resources you pour on helping those in needs there will always be more, so at some point is not about "can I help them?" is "do I want to help them?" and that is not a nice place to find ourselves in :( . How we deal with this? I really don't know but I believe that we may evolve a solution, we always did.

Online I think that time and exposure to problems will do it's magic and help us develop new social norms, practices, a sort of "antibody" that will give us the practical wisdom to deal with that too. Is hard to predict since is complex and that is why the solutions need to evolve on its own, but when I see other cases I see people developing practices that counter this behaviors².

Small communities less than the Dunbar number. That make plausible to get a grasp of who is who all the time. ↩ ↩
If you see places with particular and persistent problems like being too cold for example, people develop common wisdom over time + trial and error. Or if you go to the most savage free market environment like dark markets, people also develop unspoken rules that help them avoid common threats like phishing sites, identity theft, etc... If you know that you are looking for you will find a lot more of this examples but as the author of "The design of everyday things" say "Good design is actually a lot harder to notice... because it fit our need so well that the design is invisible" that is why we tend to be oblivious to this social responses to problems. ↩

27 sats \ 1 reply \ @Signal312 4 Mar

It's almost like empathy has shrunk, in direct proportion to how many "be kind" signs and stickers you see around...

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 4 Mar

I think the latter is probably a response to the former.

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @BountifulB 4 Mar

When making friends with other people and trying to build community, I have noticed a large number of people that have outwardly act as if they have little to no empathy whatsoever. They are lonely and want friends but they act 'high time preference' and only want to do whatever suits themselves at the moment.

Me: I just got back from the clinic and the doctor said I have a liver problem and have to be really careful to avoid all medications and toxins for 3 months.

Them: That sucks. Hey, wanna join me at happy hour at 6pm?

Me: The doctor said I can't drink AT ALL. Not sure if a bar is the the best place for me to hang out, there's too much temptation.

Them: Aw c'mon, live a little, you can have just one beer! It's not going to hurt anything.

I would like to say that it was just an isolated thing or skewed sample but I have encountered this type of behavior REPEATEDLY and I don't remember it being like this a couple decades ago.

Something has changed us!

230 sats \ 0 replies \ @phatom 4 Mar

Greed has gone too far to the extent that empathy revival is near impossible

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @DaveC 4 Mar

maybe when everyone can step off the fiat treadmill, they'll have a chance to say hi.

Footnotes