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Comment by mccoyb | Hacker News Reader

“Disconnected” feels like “has no empathy”.

Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?

Just sitting down and doing a quick calculation would immediately reveal time allocation dilemmas of prioritizing “return to office” for someone who doesn’t have the benefits.

Time is universally valuable! But even more so for someone who … has significantly less of it because they can’t hire legions of staff to manage their lives?

“What if I didn’t have this? How would that make me feel?” Pretty depressing. Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?

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I think the problem is that like the business culture in the US is so cutthroat and stressful, and people generally so self-centered. That like, they literally can’t imagine a type of life or stress that isn’t solved by muscle through it or work more or whatever.

You also end up in these bubbles where you literally can’t empathize with people because you have no experience to fall back on.

Combine that with a sort of media and religious culture that will tell you you’re right to feel that way.

I’ve hear rich people complain about the fact that rich people are people to, d that poor people don’t appreciate them enough.

And actually, I think this is a common thread these days, that essentially the world’s problems are caused by the fact that rich people don’t have enough power and aren’t trusted enough by society. Marc Andreesen implied this in his Joe Rogan interview.

Have they ever claimed otherwise?

It's not like they have a choice, gaslighting the general population is their only hope of staying on top/alive.

I've said it here many times now, but Robert Sapolsky identified inequality as one of the highest causes of stress in any given primate society. Even for those at the top.

> Is it really so hard to imagine the struggles of someone who doesn’t have any of the benefits listed in the post?

Yes, it is hard. While you can break down the struggles to analyze them, actually understanding their emotional impact is a whole different story.

> Empathy can’t run the business — but surely it is correlated with strong team cohesion and performance?

As someone who has recently shifted towards managing people, I am facing two big struggles: how to be empathetic without taking on their emotional burdens and how to respect their situation in life while ensuring they respect their responsibilities in the work place. And this is management at a very low level in the hierarchy. There isn't terribly much that separates myself from them.

I'm not suggesting that there is no role for empathy in a business. Apparently the person who came before me lacked it and survived ten weeks. I'm simply suggesting that it is difficult to balance.

CXOs only need to have empathy with the shareholders, not the resources (us).

How does someone make others care about him/her? Hmmm...

By refusing to play along in great numbers, always.

Yeah that's a good start.

I mean we’re talking about a self-selected group of people who’ve chosen money over… nearly everything else. I do think it’s hard for them to empathize because nothing in their existence encourages them to do so. They’re richly rewarded for their choices and we all just go along with it.

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