For example, I had several heated discussions about some COVID mandates with a friend from Indiana. Specifically, I worried about the denial of health procedures deemed non-essential, and the lack of ability to buy things like garden seeds in Michigan for a time.
He insisted I was blowing things out of proportion, that this was all for the greater good, and that I was selfishly harming others for my own gain (despite me personally not caring to buy garden seeds or needing any kind of medical procedure).
Months go by, my friend visits Michigan this summer (which is fairly well back to normal as of today) and he complains to me for 20 minutes that one McDonald’s location still has its lobby closed due to safety concerns, and was still on reduced hours.
Turns out, neither of these conditions lasted long in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
It occurred to me that, no matter what I said to him about the specific conditions in Michigan that bothered me, he wasn’t viewing them through my lens. He wasn’t even hearing most of the specific things I was arguing about.
He only viewed it through the lens of his own experience. Had he been unable to use the lobby of McDonalds in Indiana for more than a month or so in 2020, apparently, he would have been livid. But he didn’t, therefore anyone else with any kind of a different experience was wrong.
On the opposite spectrum, I know people who haven’t been affected at all by the virus who argue it may not exist, those who had a rough battle with it and therefore think it’s 100% fatal to everyone, and everything in between.
And it’s not just COVID, it extends to all things politics, economy, just about everything.
I wonder if the real problem is a sheer lack of ability to empathize, or relate to things outside of one’s own experiences.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s a defense mechanism. Real empathy, I argue, is painful, because it usually means relating to multiple, sometimes mutually exclusive, wants or needs, and realizing there is no one universal solution.
People seem to look for comic book heroes and villains in everything, and are uncomfortable anytime they find human beings with nuances and differing experiences in their place.