Losing Empathy and Compassion

Being aware of scenarios where I have less empathy and compassion

Originally written in March 2019 and updated a bit in 2025.

I think everyone can agree that empathy and compassion are crucial to living a quality life. Empathy allows for understanding what others may feel, while compassion is feeling concern/sympathy while wanting to take action to alleviate someone's pain. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to substitute empathy and compassion for E/C.

I want to talk about the times we lose sight of E/C. I would love to say that I have the same amount of E/C at all points in my life, whether in relaxed or stressful times, but that is definitely not the case.

Many people lose all E/C the instant they step into a car; fortunately, I don't! Well, most of the time. I almost lost it one instance when I was taking a right-hand turn and a person was just stopped there; initially, I thought, "What the heck! Why would you stop in the middle of the road so close to a corner?!" Then, I put myself in his situation and thought what if my car broke down. So, I backed up and decided to take the next street; as I was backing up, he got out of the car and started to push his car. So I decided to overcome my first response, parked my car, and helped him push his car out of traffic.

What is it about driving that triggers people to lose E/C? Is it the share number of encounters with other people? The number of instances where drivers have no control? Are people irrational when driving? People are distracted by other things when driving? Are people getting bad directions from their phones? People driving are stressed/anxious about getting somewhere faster? Probably the mix of all those things.

At some point, I accepted that people will be irrational on the roads. To avoid all the negative feelings that come with driving, I have tried to give myself more time to get to my destinations.

One place where I have a decreased sense of E/C is with family (as with many other people I know). This is something I have become keenly aware of as of late. It's so easy to treat someone, who seems to be a constant element in good and bad times, poorly. These are the people who I should treat with more E/C than anyone else in my life. Ironically, my natural instinct is often annoyance; this was probably built from childhood. To combat my instinct, I slow down my reactions when interacting with my family.

Since I am now more aware of when I tend to have reduced E/C, I hope to intentionally improve my mindset in those scenarios.