Empathy has become a kind of dog whistle of late. It used to be seen as a wholly positive thing to experience and talk about.
Then suddenly some people were talking about it as a “sin” and something we should shun, and the people who championed empathy understandably lost their minds. Now I see the word being thrown around constantly.
Then I realized that the topic of empathy is not as straightforward as it seems, and part of the problem stems from our assumptions about the meaning of words, and how that can lead us to erroneous conclusions.
Part of the problem is people assume empathy and compassion are the same thing. They’re not.
Empathy is when we take on another person’s feelings as our own. When you see someone suffering or celebrating, and you feel pain or joy even though it’s not actually happening to you, that’s empathy.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
Well, it depends if that’s the beginning and end of where your feelings take you. See, empathy on its own is a passive thing. It’s a reflexive emotional response. It’s impulsive. It’s unconscious. And that can be a problem if the only thing you’re doing is feeling.
Consider the last time you were bombarded with social media stories about injustice and tragedy… which was probably a few minutes ago.
Did you feel drained by it? Probably.
Did you feel angry because of it? Probably.
Do you feel like you can do anything to change it? Probably not.
In fact, a lot of people right now are feeling very helpless, with the weight of the world on their shoulders, feeling the pain of others and feeling powerless to stop it, but are very angry at those who are causing it. And that leads to a strong “us vs. them” reaction. We want to protect those in our group by rejecting and dehumanizing those who are not part of that group.
That, in part, is the problem with empathy. It is impulsive, divisive, draining, and, worst of all, passive.
IF that’s as far as you take it.
Where things change is when empathy spurs you into compassion. Compassion is not impulsive, it’s deliberate. It takes conscious effort, and that means bypassing the parts of our brain that instinctively have biases and want to limit our protective feelings to “me and mine.”
If empathy on its own is passive and draining, making you feel stuck, then that can lead to rumination and depression, where you keep circling around the problem over and over, but don’t actually do anything about it, which only makes you feel more helpless and stuck, which keeps you circling around the problem…
But compassion is constructive. You turn emotion into action. And action leads to positive change. And positive change reinforces that compassion. You no longer feel stuck if you are focused on the things you can do. Helping, in any small way, delivers that dopamine hit we need to reinforce positive behaviour.
So there is a point to be made about the negative effects of empathy. The problem is, a lot of the people saying that aren’t offering any alternative. They are not pointing out how compassion succeeds where empathy fails.
But here’s the thing – you need empathy to get to compassion. Empathy is not the end goal, it is only the trigger. And we need to remember that.
We tend to forget that even if we are better than animals (a dubious claim, I admit) we are still built on animal software. The deep coding in our brain goes back long before we had self awareness. And it’s still there, and we can’t just assume that because something works as intended, it’s all positive.
Pattern recognition kept us alive because it let us recognize that the movement in the bushes over there and that shadowy shape might be a predator. Now it lets us make leaps in science and art that have made the world what it is.
But pattern recognition also leads to people believing in conspiracy theories.
Recognizing that something has a negative element to it does not negate the positive that comes from it. But denying the negatives can be damaging.
So, yes, empathy is not all positives. It’s animal software. Left to its own devices, it has a dark side, and can cause some very negative things.
But it also leads to compassion. And compassion is where we rise above our animal software, and start truly thinking for ourselves.
Here are a couple of articles on the differences between Empathy and Compassion that probably do a better job of explaining things than I have.
Compassion vs. Empathy: What’s the Difference? – 2025 – MasterClass
Four Reasons Why Compassion Is Better For Humanity Than Empathy
Well said.