The definition of empathy involves actively sharing the other person’s emotional state. If you’re not doing that (and in fact feeling something very different, like disgust), you are not successfully empathizing. The title of this post should be “I rarely empathize” rather than “My empathy is rarely kind”.
In any case empathy is not a prerequisite for relating to people well. Empathy with someone very different from you is very difficult, and it’s hard to even know whether you’re actually feeling the same thing. It seems to me that most empathy is of the most coarse kind—they are feeling something happy/sad/painful and you feel something happy/sad/painful because of that. But the type of happy/sad/painful feeling may be entirely different.
Well, it could be that the other person is deceiving themselves. E.g. they claim to themselves they care a lot about other people, but then choose actions they know lead to more suffering because it requires thinking or effort. If they were being honest with themselves, they would delineate how much care they will attend to others before they won’t bother.
The definition of empathy involves actively sharing the other person’s emotional state. If you’re not doing that (and in fact feeling something very different, like disgust), you are not successfully empathizing. The title of this post should be “I rarely empathize” rather than “My empathy is rarely kind”.
In any case empathy is not a prerequisite for relating to people well. Empathy with someone very different from you is very difficult, and it’s hard to even know whether you’re actually feeling the same thing. It seems to me that most empathy is of the most coarse kind—they are feeling something happy/sad/painful and you feel something happy/sad/painful because of that. But the type of happy/sad/painful feeling may be entirely different.
Well, it could be that the other person is deceiving themselves. E.g. they claim to themselves they care a lot about other people, but then choose actions they know lead to more suffering because it requires thinking or effort. If they were being honest with themselves, they would delineate how much care they will attend to others before they won’t bother.