Ask HN: How to develop empathy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to develop empathy?

15 pointsbhagwan13 comments

A few days ago, I was walking down the street chatting with a friend when he pulled me by the arm and said "Don't step in the dog poo".

I realised that when I was in high school, my friends and I had a relationship based on camaraderie and mockery. It wasn't offensive and we knew each other's boundaries but we would all be celebrating if one of us had stepped in dog poop and we would definitely not have warned him.

How could I get rid of this taste for mocking, no matter how friendly it is?

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It’s quite simple. Don’t mock, do nice things like your friend did. It will feel forced and unnatural at first but like any habit you will adapt. No need to overthink it.

Why do you mock? Is it to put down the other? Establish social pecking order? If you want to help your friend or establish a true relationship based on mutual respect and trust, your speech should come from a place of honesty and a desire to help the other.

Helping others can actually be beneficial.. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201215-why-being-kind-t...

It’s okay to be indifferent, perhaps it’s natural for humans to be ruthless. If your friend is so self-absorbed as not to notice he is about to step into poop, then he will step in poop, just not while you’re around to smell it.

Buddhists are the most indifferent yet compassionate people I know because compassion requires impeccable mental silence at all times, and after so many years you realize it really doesn’t matter if your friend knows he’s about to step in poop or not. All that matters is that he learns his lesson, that he was too important to not notice the poop himself, and that’s not something you can tell him, he has to learn that lesson himself.

I think you're going around in circles here, ethically. It's a lot of sentences to justify that you shouldn't care about other people because it's not your problem.

Mockery in a friendly setting does not equal a lack of empathy. It reads like you're being too hard on yourself. What is the reason you feel bad about taste of mocking even in a friendly way?

It’s not necessarily bad to enjoy camaraderie and mockery but of course you need to keep a mental model of who likes that and who doesn’t. As you meet new people you need to think “do they have that sense of humour”. Australia is well know for “if they take the mick it means they like you” but not everyone is like that.

The best thing is be yourself but add a layer of “Hope I didn’t offend you - I like to tease sometimes”. And add a tonne of common sense too!

> It wasn't offensive and we knew each other's boundaries

Then what's the problem?

Why Are People Mean? by Donald Carveth, PhD

http://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth/Why%20Are%20People%20Mean.pdf

Empathy growth is a side effect of a meditation. As a rule you do a meditation for some other reason, and you get more empathy as a bonus.

> How could I get rid of this taste for mocking, no matter how friendly it is?

At some point, you either start to think that this behaviour is too dumb for the person you want to be, or not.

The obvious phrase is “when I was in high school”. Most just grow out of it and have no need to mock people. You probably have grown out of it too.

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