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Comment by drakonka | Hacker News Reader

I always thought of empathy as being able to really relate, emotionally, to what another person is feeling/going through. As a kid I'd sometimes see people crying together on TV when something bad happens to one of them and wonder if that really happens in real life. Even though it wasn't something that came naturally to me in the past, I still tried to be a decent person and adjust my behavior where relevant, and tried to learn to comfort people even when I didn't really "feel" much. I just had to reason/logic about how a person might feel sometimes rather than intuitively "get" it.

Over the last couple of years, that kind of empathy has stated coming more easily/naturally to me. On one hand it seems to have unlocked a richer range of relatability, but on the other it also seemed to open the door more to anxiety, self-doubt, and other not so easy emotions that I didn't really feel much of before.

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Yes. I'd go so far as to say empathy has nothing to do with being nice, it's simply the ability to feel, often involuntarily, what other people feel. It's the part of you which makes you wince when you see someone stub their toe.

It's a type of feelings which can inspire you to be nice to other people, but it can also actually make you not nice to them. When people make you feel things you don't want to feel.

An example of that is "cringe" - you see someone do something embarrassing, which would at least have embarrassed you if you were in their situation, even if it doesn't embarrass them. And so you feel vicarious embarrassment, embarrassment on their behalf - and you can easily get angry at them for this.

At an extreme, we may even dehumanize people, try to stop thinking of them as the same thing as us, because involuntary empathy with them would otherwise mess us up emotionally.

>vicarious embarrassment

Boy did I hate this one being taught to me back in the day, by my country's first privately owned TV channel.

In German we have a word more specific, I'd argue: "Fremdschämen". It means literally "foreign-shame". It is the feeling of exactly that, seeing someone doing something embarrassing, and feeling ashamed for them in their perspective. Which I would say is a form of empathy.

Oh dang every sentence of this had me relating more and more as I read it.

The last 10ish years of my life have been an emotional education journey, where previously I was a “logic above all else” kind of person. Like you, I feel like I can relate to other people now in a way I never thought possible. And also it’s brought about anxiety and self-doubt that was never here before.

Some life-events are just "big", and it can be very-difficult-to-impossible to relate to that experience if you haven't had one of a similar scale yourself. I still struggle with expressing the emotion "I have fortunately not had that happen to me, but what you have lived through is awful."

Yeah I used to understand empathy as a milder understanding. Being careful, but not necessarily feeling fully others emotions. That said along years my brain changed and at one point I became emotionally responsive to others. Maybe that comes when you reach parenting age.

Your story is very similar to mine, but it was unlocked even further when I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult at 38 years old, and began stimulant medication. I feel goosebumps from music, I’m much more likely to cry (in a good way I think)

I've also been more likely to cry at movies. Not so much at people's sad experiences in real life, but I've found myself tearing up sometimes with someone I really care about sharing a dream or nostalgic childhood memory. Fortunately I've experienced goosebumps with music (frisson!) since I was a kid, and even tried to learn how to induce it on command (has not reliably worked).

Overall my ability to empathize still feels a little dulled sometimes. But it's hard to tell since you can't really compare it directly to another's experience, only observe how others seem to react... Maybe in its own way this is a bit of a "What is it like to be a bat?" situation.

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