sannoji
dreaming of flying
- May 4, 2023
- 60
i hate that saying so so much. weirdly, i have so much history with it and it's part of what made me start feeling so inhuman. i don't have any affective empathy really and cognitive is really quite a lot of effort for me, to a degree that others don't seem to have. so more than anything, that makes me feel really divorced from the human race. i would always kind of just stand there doing nothing if my family got upset and my parents would always go "you've got no empathy, you evil thing. you don't even care."
i also despise it as a marker of whether or not someone is a 'good' person. i've known several other people who also struggle with empathy who have been perfectly nice. shouldn't it make them 'better' people anyway, when you're putting in active effort to care about others? but noooo, if it isn't instinctive to you then you're just. not human apparently. personally, i don't think there's any personality trait that you'd have to have to be an 'actual human.' all of them end up excluding someone.
tangentially related, i learned about altruism in class a while back and they were talking about egoistic helping which is just to alleviate your own suffering because of someone else's suffering, and when you do proper altruistic helping it's solely because of wanting to alleviate the other person's suffering. i kind of laughed because i guess i always only do the first one. makes me wonder if i'm an awful sort of person sometimes, but other times i conclude it's just the rest of the world that's wrong.
i also despise it as a marker of whether or not someone is a 'good' person. i've known several other people who also struggle with empathy who have been perfectly nice. shouldn't it make them 'better' people anyway, when you're putting in active effort to care about others? but noooo, if it isn't instinctive to you then you're just. not human apparently. personally, i don't think there's any personality trait that you'd have to have to be an 'actual human.' all of them end up excluding someone.
tangentially related, i learned about altruism in class a while back and they were talking about egoistic helping which is just to alleviate your own suffering because of someone else's suffering, and when you do proper altruistic helping it's solely because of wanting to alleviate the other person's suffering. i kind of laughed because i guess i always only do the first one. makes me wonder if i'm an awful sort of person sometimes, but other times i conclude it's just the rest of the world that's wrong.