How We Can Use Empathy to Cultivate a Sense of Fulfilment
And how practicing it can help us grow.
There are a million things we must or must not do in order to be happy. I say “we” because this is everyone’s ultimate goal, including mine. A constant state of happiness.
We read thousands and thousands of words that if ingested and put to practice, will help us conquer anxiety, worry, and misery.
The concepts of self-love and love for others, the morning routine, the evening routine, use of meditation, yoga, gratitude… so many keys to success, so many doors opened for us to explore.
The very endless list is overwhelming, to say the least.
That said, I want us to delve into the realm of another often overlooked habit. I don’t claim that such a habit can bring us absolute, unwavering happiness, but rather, a feeling of fulfillment, which ties in with success, and ultimately, happiness, according to many.
“True happiness is a state of fulfillment.” — Ashish Sophat
But first, let’s discuss what happens without it.
Remote Control
Derren Brown, a psychological magician, presented a show called The Remote Control in 2011 that tested the audience without their knowledge. The unknowing participants would seemingly have the ability to determine the fate of a random stranger. The poor guy (or as I’d like to call him, the victim), being filmed live, was due out with a few friends who were in the know and asked to act accordingly, along with a few actors.
The audience, every so often, was faced with two choices that would impact the stranger they were watching on a big screen. One option was positive, and the other was negative. They were all asked to wear a mask while making their choices with a remote control placed by each of their seats.
The first set of choices was between someone spilling their drink on the guy or not, whereas an option later on escalated to whether or not to break into his apartment and smash up his belongings. Each scenario increased in severity until eventually, the last option was whether to have the poor guy kidnapped or not.
The audience was not even a little bit conflicted morally throughout the entire show.
The bad scenario was chosen every single time by a huge majority vote. In fact, everyone was laughing and enjoying their new sense of power, right up until the very end, where they were shown footage of a man being kidnapped, him subsequently running away and getting run over by a truck. This scene was a stunt carefully acted out to fool the audience into thinking that their actions got the poor man killed.
It was to show that when there is anonymity, people challenge their own moral boundaries by acting out of character, sometimes even maliciously. In Derren’s words,
“Anonymity can turn perfectly nice people into internet bullies, or rioters, or hooligans”.
The audience thought it was a game and a lighthearted bit of mockery like You’ve Been Framed, or the classic show presented by Ashton Kutcher Punk’d. At the end of the day, all three shows prove one thing: seeing others go through difficult and awkward times is entertaining (from a distance). Empathy, here, goes out of the window.
While psychologists may be able to identify an array of weaknesses to Derren’s experiment here, I think he maintains a strong point about anonymity and morality. When there are no consequences, people often choose entertainment over empathy, and they enjoy seeing others suffer.
“The greatest cruelty is our casual blindness to the despair of others.” — Anonymous
Moral Detachment
If you were to witness the same scenes above in front of your own eyes, it is of my personal opinion that you’d feel slightly more empathy than if you watched it behind a TV screen, even if you still did nothing to intervene or help.
The fact the audience thought they were participating in a game spares them of any kind of moral responsibility to maintain the wellbeing of the stranger. However, their conscience still made the decision to choose entertainment over “what is right”, because they didn’t consider anything else other than pure and simple fun for themselves.
Similarly, if you are anonymous, Derren’s argument is that, without the consequences, you wouldn’t consider morality quite as much when making decisions that impact others negatively. This would explain the massive increase in bullying online and trolling. People lose regard and empathy for others when there is no discipline nor punishment.
The fact that there are now laws and policies in place to help protect victims of online abuse says it all. All you have to do is search through all the social media platforms and you will find a “report” section, for starters.
According to an article in The Guardian in 2016,
“The number of children and young people tormented by online trolls increased by 88% in five years” with more than 2,000 calling the Childline charity for help.
It reminds me of the classic novel “The Lord of the Flies”, where a group of preadolescent kids get stranded on a desert island after a plane crash and they are left to fend for themselves, with no adults to help them. They attempt to govern themselves while they wait to be rescued, but over time, morality is abandoned by some of the children which eventually leads to the brutal murder of one of the kids, Piggy.
A 1950s version of Black Mirror, if you ask me.
In any case, the moral of the story (did you see the pun?) is that, without punishment or exercise, empathy diminishes, and chaos is born.
“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” — Hannah Arendt
Empathy is Nurtured
“Empathy grows as we learn.” — Alice Miller
You are more likely to make the moral judgment to help a child stood right in front of you than you are for a child struggling in another country.
This to me suggests that empathy is only present with certain conditions, thus making empathy instrumental rather than intrinsic. It means that empathy is not absolute, and it must be taught and nurtured.
“Empathy is learned behavior even though the capacity for it is inborn.” — Psychology today.
Everyone has different moral boundaries, and those boundaries are flexible.
For example, distance matters. Near events seem to be more of “our business” than far events, according to Jonas Nagel and Michael R. Waldmann’s paper on Deconfounding Distance Effects in Judgments of Moral Obligation.
In one of their experiments, 102 subjects were tested for their moral sense of obligation. They found that people are much more likely to want to save a child from drowning right in front of them than send money via a charity to save 30 children from starvation and death in a different country.
There is the saying “charity begins at home” which is well in line with this theory. We are more likely to help those around us because the problem affects us more when we see it in front of us.
Empathy is Good for Everyone
“The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.” — Meryl Streep
We accept that to have a well-balanced and healthy society, we must all nurture a sense of empathy. As stated before, the capacity for empathy is there, even if we aren’t magically born with it.
While everyone’s ability to empathize is relative, we can accept that having empathy is intrinsically good for everyone.
According to Psychology Today,
“Survival as a result of reading others is the core of empathy.”
It goes on to explain that our ability to read emotions at one point or another could save our lives, for example, if someone, in alarm, yells for us to run away from a threat.
Research also shows that compassionate people are generally happier. Empathy lowers stress and could be the answer to avoiding burnout at work:
“When we fully engage in empathy, we draw on skills for emotion regulation. In doing so, we are also controlling emotions that can be stressful. Thus, the side benefit from being fully engaged empathically is that we can be exercising good control over our emotions, taking care of our own stress.” — Psychology Today
By exercising empathy we are more likely to feel fulfilled.
Practicing Empathy
There are many ways to exercise empathy. The key is to keep it consistent because it is a lifelong habit.
We listen more intently.
We engage in deeper conversations with those we love and take an interest in building new relationships. Active listening, more specifically, is a great way to trigger empathy because it helps us really put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
We give.
We give a little bit of ourselves away. We can volunteer at a food bank, donate some of our unused belongings, travel to a third world country to help those in need, or simply do the food shop for our elderly neighbor.
My work has always been related to helping others, on smaller and larger scales. I worked as a Customer Service Professional for 5 years before I dove into helping refugees for the local government. Now, while I put most of my energy into bringing up my tiny human, I hope that writing about my journey on personal growth will inspire others to want to lead a better life of their own.
“Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another.” – Alfred Adler
We teach.
Our actions lead by example and show others around us, especially our kids, the importance of empathy. When we exercise it, we are nurturing it in others.
Empathy is nurtured from birth, so I want to give the best possible start to our son by showing him how we practise empathy with others. The other day, our son showed worry when he witnessed another child falling over and crying by pointing and saying “ouchie”. The pride in me was immense.
Takeaway
In a world where the ability to strip ourselves of our morality is becoming easier, we must remember that empathy is necessary for human survival in mass and individually speaking.
Thus, to be happier — to grow, and to feel fulfilled — we must give a part of ourselves to others. The way to do this is by increasing our feeling of empathy.
Whether we choose to help our neighbor or donate money to a charity that helps children in a third world country, or simply hold our friend’s hand when they talk to us about something that’s troubling them, we must see empathy as an everlasting virtue and never cease the practice of it.
So, if there is anything new you want to start in 2021, give a little of yourself to others every day by practicing empathy.
“Compassion, empathy, and love are the real pillars we need to build within ourselves to become human.” — Loknath
Sylvia Emokpae, thinker and philosopher, is passionate about self-love, motherhood, and pro-race. See more work like this.
