{"id":12839,"date":"2018-03-28T11:14:59","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T05:44:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/?p=12839"},"modified":"2021-02-20T15:18:49","modified_gmt":"2021-02-20T09:48:49","slug":"the-intrigues-of-my-empathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/2018\/03\/28\/the-intrigues-of-my-empathy\/","title":{"rendered":"The intrigues of my empathy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Simran<\/a> was on TV, and though I didn’t watch the entire movie, I was intrigued enough to read up about Sandeep Kaur – the Bombshell Bandit<\/a>, whose life it is vaguely based on. A tragic story of a 24 year old, who will most likely be unable to live what one might call a normal life. Did she make wrong choices? Of course, but in her shoes, things might not be as simple as that.<\/p>\n

D said recently that my sense of empathy confuses her. Apparently, from what she has noticed, it is\u00a0high when the interactions are transactional in nature – Uber drivers, hotel\/restaurant\/security staff and such. However, it is completely missing in action in places where she expects it, say close relatives.<\/p>\n

I have to admit, it used to confuse me too! But when I thought about it, there is a pattern to it, though a rather strange one. It follows a U shape – high for people I don’t know, as well as those whom I am really comfortable with, and low for people in between. The bottom of the U is occupied by those who have broken my trust in some way.<\/p>\n

These\u00a0could either be people I didn’t know, tried to help and who exploited my trust, or people who were formerly in my close circle. Our former ironing guy is a classic example of the first. Loaned him money, he vanished for quite a while, came back with a sob story, repeated the process twice more, and is now off our list.\u00a0In the second case, it is my judgment that causes the slip – judgment on\u00a0their decision making, their values, how they behave with me, how they behave with others, sense of fairness and so on. Over a period of time, I stop trying to walk in their shoes. In both cases, trust is my currency. I try communication once or twice if it gets broken, and then I switch off. Completely. Yeah, I know! Maybe it’s my defense mechanism against unnecessary pain.<\/p>\n

Farnam Street has an excellent long read<\/a>, whose url title I like more than the actual article title. It draws out the differences between emotional and cognitive empathy. I think I possess the latter, and\u00a0also believe what the article ends with – we\u00a0will be better served by improving our ability to reason rather than leveraging our ability to empathize<\/em>. The reasoning gives me criteria based on which I decide who deserves empathy. Is that a good thing? It has its ayes and it has its nays, but that’s a story for another day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Simran was on TV, and though I didn’t watch the entire movie, I was intrigued enough to read up about Sandeep Kaur – the Bombshell Bandit, whose life it is vaguely based on. A tragic story of a 24 year old, who will most likely be unable to live what one might call a normal […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1479,412,6268],"tags":[5510,5511,4980],"class_list":["post-12839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughtstream","category-life","category-self","tag-cognitive-empathy","tag-emotional-empathy","tag-empathy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12839"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15704,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12839\/revisions\/15704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}