Empathy and comparing tragedies
This is a story about a war reporter who, while recording events in the midst of the nauseating stench of decaying bodies, bloodshed and the ungodly screams of the wounded soldiers, he received a call from his daughter.
She spoke through intermittent fits of uncontrollable sobbing. He waited for her to calm down in order to ask her about her trouble.
"My ... gold fish ... Coco ..... died," she intermittently said as she spastically breathed.
"How dare she complain about a dead fish while people were losing their lives as he spoke to her," he mused in disbelief.
The death of her goldfish within her internal model carries the same weight as the death of the soldiers on the battlefield, witnessed by her dad.
We might even surmise that the impact on her was even greater because of the personal aspect of her relationship with her pet.
This illustrates how our internal models create different realities for each person, making empathy a challenging feeling to foster.
The father's immediate and initial reaction reveals how our own experiences can keep us from relating to other people's suffering.
In his reality, the massive amount of deaths, horrible as it is, is still impersonal, while in her case, the death of her fish is intimate.
Both their perspectives exist in completely different emotional universes.
This story makes us recognize that empathy isn't about comparing suffering, but about acknowledging that different internal models creates their different realities.
The father's empathy led him to recognize his daughter's pain and not treate it as a triviality by realizing that her goldfish represented to her love and companionship.
True empathy requires us to step outside our own experiences and recognize that someone else's crisis, however small it might look, can be devastating within their internal framework.
The war reporter who document humanity's greatest horrors could also acknowledge his daughter's first real encounter with loss.
Both experiences are deserving of compassion, even when they seem widly different both in scale and impact.
This illustrates how our internal models create different realities for each person, making empathy a challenging feeling to foster.
The father's immediate and initial reaction reveals how our own experiences can keep us from relating to other people's suffering.
In his reality, the massive amount of deaths, horrible as it is, is still impersonal, while in her case, the death of her fish is intimate.
Both their perspectives exist in completely different emotional universes.
This story makes us recognize that empathy isn't about comparing suffering, but about acknowledging that different internal models creates their different realities.
The father's empathy led him to recognize his daughter's pain and not treate it as a triviality by realizing that her goldfish represented to her love and companionship.
True empathy requires us to step outside our own experiences and recognize that someone else's crisis, however small it might look, can be devastating within their internal framework.
The war reporter who document humanity's greatest horrors could also acknowledge his daughter's first real encounter with loss.
Both experiences are deserving of compassion, even when they seem widly different both in scale and impact.
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