However, I think the part of empathy that people will say you’re missing is that you’re putting “yourself” in someone else’s shoes, which is only half of it. Imagine you were Isekai’d away into someone else’s life where you had a history of being ineffective, unaccomplished, and self-pitying, with problems that could be solved quickly with relatively little objective effort. You can probably easily imagine how you’d quickly take actions to at least fix most of the low-hanging fruit in this situation. Clean your room, get a job, do at least some exercise, remove the nail and all that.
But if you put yourself in the position of that person, including their internal mental state, possible brain chemistry issues, history of failure despite attempts to fix it, and possibly limited inherent capacities relative to yours, the situation they are in would probably seem a lot less fixable. If you put yourself exactly in their position, with the exact mental state and capacities, you would be doing the exact same things they are currently.
For the woman whose pain is “not about the nail” there has to be something going on in her own head, whether it’s some history of trauma, history of repeatedly failing to address the problem to the point it becomes painful to address it, that is stopping her from addressing the problem. Otherwise she would just fix it, no? To empathize with her isn’t then to imagine yourself if you were that woman and had a nail in your head, but to imagine what it’s like to be her, including whatever it is that’s preventing her to solve her own problem.
This sort of empathy might be more useful in understanding people, which can help you achieve your own goals better. There’s always a need to make friends and influence people after all. Otherwise you’re right in that putting yourself in other people’s shoes (the ones who demand empathy are probably more likely to be pathetic), then seeing all the relatively easy things they could do to make their lives significantly better reasonably results in what you described with your first post.
I agree with your first post.
However, I think the part of empathy that people will say you’re missing is that you’re putting “yourself” in someone else’s shoes, which is only half of it. Imagine you were Isekai’d away into someone else’s life where you had a history of being ineffective, unaccomplished, and self-pitying, with problems that could be solved quickly with relatively little objective effort. You can probably easily imagine how you’d quickly take actions to at least fix most of the low-hanging fruit in this situation. Clean your room, get a job, do at least some exercise, remove the nail and all that.
But if you put yourself in the position of that person, including their internal mental state, possible brain chemistry issues, history of failure despite attempts to fix it, and possibly limited inherent capacities relative to yours, the situation they are in would probably seem a lot less fixable. If you put yourself exactly in their position, with the exact mental state and capacities, you would be doing the exact same things they are currently.
For the woman whose pain is “not about the nail” there has to be something going on in her own head, whether it’s some history of trauma, history of repeatedly failing to address the problem to the point it becomes painful to address it, that is stopping her from addressing the problem. Otherwise she would just fix it, no? To empathize with her isn’t then to imagine yourself if you were that woman and had a nail in your head, but to imagine what it’s like to be her, including whatever it is that’s preventing her to solve her own problem.
This sort of empathy might be more useful in understanding people, which can help you achieve your own goals better. There’s always a need to make friends and influence people after all. Otherwise you’re right in that putting yourself in other people’s shoes (the ones who demand empathy are probably more likely to be pathetic), then seeing all the relatively easy things they could do to make their lives significantly better reasonably results in what you described with your first post.