Your Empathy Isn’t Helping Anyone

You think your suffering serves them. It doesn’t.

When you feel someone’s pain as your own, when you absorb their anguish into your body, when you lie awake carrying the weight of tragedies you cannot change, you believe this is what caring looks like. You think your empathy is the gift.

It’s not. It’s drowning.

Here’s the mechanics:

Empathy means you feel with the other person. You merge with their experience. Their pain becomes your pain. Now there are two people suffering instead of one. You haven’t reduced the suffering in the world. You’ve increased it.

Compassion means you feel for them, not with them. You see their pain. You care about their pain. You might even feel some of it. But you don’t completely merge with it. You don’t drown in their storm.

This isn’t cold. This is functional love.

The balance is this: Some pain keeps you connected. Too much pain just adds to the world’s suffering.

The video above breaks down the full mechanics of empathy versus compassion. Watch it.