There are times when an emotion comes over one person and not the other. Fear may grip Indiana Jones amongst a group of snakes, but in the face of guns of explosions, he has confidence and poise. I might be the opposite.

It gets challenging though when you have to work with someone whose emotions react differently. When someone else is afraid of a spider, and I feel no danger that the spider can enflict damage, I still need to empathize somehow, out of respect and compassion. A spider example may not be very important, but more serious things such as death of a pet, or being called loser/fat, having creepy men nearby while alone, are just a few that require active support. Most of these are areas which usually have no effect on me and are the hardest to understand.

The most common form of empathy that I have neglected to give is toward the attention-starved or lonely. I sometimes recognize that some people want attention to keep their emotions from nosediving into misery. However, I live just fine alone and dont really get bothered. The second factor is that I just dont want to give that much of my own time and effort to feed someone else’s deficiency when there is no actual improvement. Usually I just wish they become stronger and less dependent, just how I am, but it is not empathetic to wish away someone’s problems and at the same time making their attention amounts worse. Often I am made aware or I can sense emotional problems, but do not take extra effort to make it my concern. Other times I forget to follow up once the conversation ends, but their problem doesn’t end.

I really feel that modern society is bad at this. I don’t know many empathetic people, but I would like to be one of them. This needs to improve.