Empathy — the superpower

Empathy is the ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine yourself in their place. Essentially, it is putting yourself in someone else’s position and feeling what they must be feeling. — verywellmind.com

Polarization is on the rise. If it’s about electric or fossil fuel cars, vaccinated or unvaccinated, rich or poor... It feels like the world is getting black and white without all the grey area in between. Absolute madness. We know that mass media & social media is a big driver of this (attention-economy) and that polarized articles or hateful news drive time spent on site. Even though we get filled up with hate for one or the other with a different opinions, we should not forget, we’re all human. We all make mistakes, but so we can all learn from them. We might get lost in an echo chamber in this big World Wide Web, but it is also on us, to discuss humble and to make things better not worse. We all shouldn’t be to certain of many things. As I like to say, there is no truth, but only different perspectives.

Think about yourself 3–4 years ago, what did you know? How certain have you been that you’re absolutely right? As I can speak for myself, back then I thought I knew how the world was running and that I’m absolutely right about myself. Boy was I wrong. I continued to learn and to grow and definitely changed some perspectives on many topics. And the Chris in 3 years will think the same.

You may not feel empathy for everyone, but we can definitely do better, even if it’s hard sometimes. You don’t know what’s going on in their live, what they’ve been through and what package they are daily caring. Also let’s not not forget, everyone is currently living in his own filter bubble, they may never read the things you read or saw things that you saw. Try to make conversations meaningful again. Maybe you can learn something which wasn’t in your pre-ocupied mind and maybe you can share your perspective so that they can learn from you. Let’s not divide us by media & governments, let’s learn together and let us grow. Empathy is definitely a superpower in this cold & confusing world and absolutely necessary for the survival of our civilization.