Emotional Journey Maps

 

Empathy, as a concept, seems pretty simple. We often think of it as one’s ability to see things from someone else’s viewpoint and understand what that person feels. There isn’t much mutability, or so it may seem. However, “The End of Empathy,” which is a podcast from April 2019, pokes a finger squarely into both eyes of such a simplistic world view. The podcast explores empathic roadways that not only intersect, but they layer one atop another, complicating empathy in a manner that lays bare a network, not a straightforward concept.

To begin with an overview of events, Hannah, a journalist who often writes about empathy, introduces Jack, who offers up his story of having been an “incel,” an involuntarily celibate male. Speaking from the distance of his twenty-year-old self, Jack describes adolescent face-to-face interactions with females that leave him feeling awkward and self-conscious. In response, Jack begins an online relationship with a female referred to as M, who is five years older. Jack lies about his age, and the two develop a relationship that moves from being online to daily telephone calls. Based on Jack’s description, it seems as if they come to see themselves as boyfriend and girlfriend from afar because at first, he does not discuss them meeting in person. Eventually, this relationship shifts when M begins college. The two break things off, but Jack becomes enraged when M begins seeing another person. In retaliation, Jack sends nude photos of M to her parents, professors, and friends. Although M wants nothing to do with him, Jack boards a plane bound for M’s hometown. Upon arrival, he calls her repeatedly, asking to meet. She declines repeatedly before eventually picking him up. Concerned that he might have a weapon, M asks Jack to strip to his boxer shorts before they begin a heated conversation during which Jack states that M strangles him. The police arrive, and according to Jack, he tells them he was suicidal and had spent time in a mental ward so he might avoid ruining her life. He later professes a change of heart and presents himself as a changed man who has eschewed the incel mindset.

Hannah also includes Lena in this podcast. A female with a strong outlook consistent with the #Me Too movement, Lena presents with an air akin to US Representative Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez. As Hannah delves into her reactions to Jack’s story, we see that Lena is very much in tune with the challenges that so many women face throughout their lives. She is strident in which behaviors she deems acceptable versus unacceptable, and her vocal tone conveys the strength of her conviction that Jack’s actions are not only unacceptable, but there seems to be no intention of trying to understand his viewpoints, at least in the beginning. However, as Lena listens, she does find herself slipping into glimpses of compassion for Jack, something that bothers her deeply because she sees his behavior as disrespectful and reprehensible.

Because Hannah’s goal in her work is to examine empathy, she was conflicted because Lena had been unable to make the same empathetic connections to Jack that she had, so she decides to have the two speak. During their shared conversation, Hannah realized that she may have misinterpreted Jack’s change and overestimated how much empathy he had gained. At the same time, through Lena’s interactions with Jack, Hannah was able to see that in her eagerness to locate empathy, she had skipped some major stumbling points in Jack’s true personality. Lena asked Jack to retell the story of what had happened when he had seen M from her point of view, a task he was able to do. In fact, he was able to see specific actions from what was likely M’s experience. However, even though he could understand how M felt, he nevertheless reverted to how the actual events were as he depicted them, through his own interpretive lens. He persisted in representing M’s view as skewed and his own as correct.

The intriguing thing here is that each actor, Jack, Lena, and Hannah, has her or his own set of prior experiences along with a unique view of the events Jack describes. Jack and Lena seem to approach the situation with less adeptness at stepping into someone else’s empathy bubble. That is, both seem, at least initially, to be firmly anchored in the “rightness” of their own views. This makes them less willing to edge toward a fuller examination of how the others in this story feel. While both are able to venture in that direction after a period of time, neither is really able to connect authentically and truly establish a compassionate connection to the others. For both, it is as if forging this kind of link is somehow threatening to their core beliefs about who each of them is as a person. So while they do peek into the others’ experiences, they return to their “home base” empathic mode, one in which others’ feelings are sort of okay, but they are not as okay or right as their own beliefs.

Hannah is a bit different in that she professes to be keenly interested in delving deeply into others’ empathy bubbles. Indeed, she does seem to be more able to peel back the proverbial onion layers. However, she is still operating within her own “home base” of her interpretations instead of what others present. She goes right from claiming that she was raised to be empathetic to asserting she is empathetic to buying into Jack’s metamorphosis without having actually examined the touchpoints that occurred during this supposed change. In other words, she was so in her own head about finding empathy for Jack that she skipped thinking about all that happened and instead went directly to the happy ending, where Jack fits into her pre-ideated conception of being a worthwhile empathy recipient.

Each of these podcasts characters resides in her or his own mindset to a far greater extent than I might have thought otherwise. While each is able to extend empathy toward others, they do so at varying levels and for different purposes. Moreover, none of them deploys empathy as altruism. Each extends empathy as a way of gaining something for him or herself. While Hannah is using the practice to create her podcasts, Jack and Lena selectively use empathy as a means of shoring up their own positions as being “right.” None of them really enters the empathy transaction because of some deep, abiding conviction that it is good to see and understand the other person’s viewpoints just because it matters to them to do so. None note that in understanding the others, they gain something intangible. They do not express a sense of gladness just because they were able to consider the situation from a nonjudgmental angle, one that does little other than to help them “get it” more fully.

I may have bitten off far more than I can chew, to use a canned phrase, with my project. If I consider this podcast’s overarching message, not only am I looking at a huge empathy gap because the different stakeholders have vastly different prior and current experiences. Those very diverse experiences are apt to affect how their own empathy levels can be leveraged. While I do think many people will have an automatic sense of empathy for the problems arising from poorly designed handicap accessible parking spaces, the reality is that to a great extent, I am working on a project that affects relatively few. That means the majority will have a great deal of trouble imagining what these problems are like. Moreover, in the able-bodied realm, we scurry about, so often in a rush. Our own priorities take precedence, and we often become impatient if we have to put ourselves into someone else’s frame of reference. I work with this population, and I get impatient. And then I feel guilty for feeling that way. Then I kick myself and withhold some empathy from myself for slipping like human beings do.

Another problem I know I will encounter is that there are a decent number of people who think nothing at all of parking in handicap accessible spaces when it is raining or they just feel tired. For these people, the empathy level  can be very low in the first place, and some of my stakeholders will likely be business owners who are less apt to see the problem I present…one that will cost money to address…as a “real” problem. If any of these business owners fall into the category of those who use handicap accessible parking when it is convenient for them, it will be even harder to get them to try to view the issue from a different angle.

While I agree that empathy seems to be at an all time low with some people, I also see evidence of people caring enough to actually think about not only how others feel, but also about all they how, when, and why questions that accompany such ideas. Although I admit that it is really, really hard for me to even want to venture into the heads of some people—people who are narcissistic navel gazers, for example—I do think it is important for me to at least try to slog through their thought processes and feelings. Doing so offers what I think may be the sole chance to sway them, even if just a little, toward a more compassionate action plan for the masses. And to be honest, I’m not so sure we have another too in our arsenals to move toward a critical mass of empathy, one that can save us all.