Why do i feel empathy? Why do i still care about people? Mind

>>35279169
at least you're a functioning member of society

>>35279266

Except im not. Im a robot just like the rest of you, with added normalfag bullshit to make my life even more shit.

>>35279169
I don't have empathy because I went through so much abuse and loss growing up, that I don't feel good or bad for anyone anymore, and I disassociate a lot too. It's not really easy. You need empathy to make rational decisions even though it sounds like the opposite is true, and it's really difficult to form any meaningful connections. Very easy to meet people and drop them or hurt them over and over. You lose out on the majority of the human experience good and bad, you will never feel good for someone else, you will never have a child and enjoy playing with them because it's boring and you don't care how they feel. etc. It's a good thing you have it.

>>35279348

>I don't have empathy because I went through so much abuse and loss growing up,

I did too, yet i still am this way. I see your point and i know there is an "upside" to it, but being just as much of a loser as the rest of you AND not being able to stop giving a fuck about people is a really shitty thing to live with. I probably will already miss out on most of the human experience, except i also cannot stop feeling bad for how much of a cruel shithole this world is.

Worst part of empathy is that it's never paid back. I mean I don't expect people to give me stuff, I want them to be happy just because that's the way it is, but I wish that they'd at least not fuck me over.

Instead no, it never matters if you have good intentions, if you wanted to make them happy, anything. If you're always nice then people see it as the norm and don't appreciate it at all. Instead you get betrayed, you get abandoned, you get treated like trash for no reason.

Tbh I wish I had been born a sociopath sometimes, caring about people is a huge burden a lot of times, and all you get in return is people trying to take advantage of you.

>>35279432
Are you in a place where you can try and heal yourself?

>>35279169

>tfw i am a little earthworm on that carpet frantically squirming up and down trying to get to that holy cleft between her legs before she gets up and moves

>>35279519
and by that i mean, can you reflect on what went wrong in your development. So that you can counteract. for example to see how you can increase your selfworth ( or at least act as if you had any) so that the normies have respect of your good deeds.

>>35279507

This this this, this so much. Good, kind people get exploited and treated like cucks. The only people who get ahead in life are those who are willing to fuck anyone else over for a little bit of personal gain.

>>35279519

In what sense? If you're talking about having people who can support me, than no. Im an autismo virgin loser like the rest of you, the only difference is that i still care about people.

Does anyone even want your empathy? I don't mean you as in a tally in some voting pool, I mean you personally. If you're a robot then probably not. Empathy is a tool to get places. My empathy won't get me places. I am a robot so I am jaded and bitter. Doesn't mean I am emotionless it just means I have no good reason to virtue signal.

>>35279432
Think of it this way though: you CAN care about and feel for someone. It may not seem like you will find someone it's worth caring about. You may be missing out compared to some people socially. But you have the potential to care for others in a way someone without empathy never can.

The best I can care about someone is basically if I view them as a possession or see them for the fun they provide me, which sounds kind of sick and selfish, but I try very hard to be a nice person and show empathy towards others. The best I can do is basically twist valuing someone into making me be nice. But the moment I devalue someone or stop finding them fun it's really hard not to abandon them and it's really really hard to keep friends long term, because I have zero emotional attachment.

My connections are so shallow and at this point, it's basically who I am. I'm content, but I know I'm missing out on so much. You have the potential to care for someone, to love someone, to feel really good about someone else, even if the pain of empathy can be really difficult. The pain is not necessarily perfect though, and it's realistic that you may be able to turn things around and enjoy life and closeness.
>>35279507
People can be very shitty to each other and it's sad. I'm sorry you've been hurt so much to feel that way. On the bright side, even if it's possible to go through so much pain, at least you can have peaks with other people and true closeness that would never be possible for someone lacing empathy.

>>35279617
(cont)
>>35279507
>>Tbh I wish I had been born a sociopath sometimes, caring about people is a huge burden a lot of times, and all you get in return is people trying to take advantage of you.
Sociopathy and psychopathy are terms still used in research if not diagnosis, but sociopathy is developed from trauma as a coping mechanism generally playing into personality traits already there, psychopathy you are born with. The difference between inability to see red and never having seen colour. Being either basically guarantees you to struggle to live any sort of normal life and makes it almost impossible to have any sort of real intimacy with people. Most people with them become addicted to drugs or go to prison. So rest assured you're almost certainly better off not being one. Though there's other psychiatric conditions that can cause lack of empathy such as dissociative disorders and depression.

>>35279605

Good example of what i mean here. Most people tend just use empathy as tool to get something they want, or to virtue signal for validation. And i have to be stuck with bullshit like "principles" and "doing the right thing"

And to answer your question, no, probably not.

>>35279670
It's true people can be very selfish with empathy, but lacking it and being indifferent to morals just makes you likely to be even more selfish. If it's easy to twist empathy into being selfish, imagine how easy it is to hurt and use others and not care about them without it. That may sound appealing from a personal level because you are an exception and it may help you get some things you want if you aren't afraid of hurting or being hurt by people, but people have empathy in general for a reason, and it would be a mess if no one felt bad or guilty for harming others. Empathy is its own kind of pain avoidance response (ironically since it can put you in so much pain).

>>35279719

Yeah but most empathy is just virtue signaling to be accepted by others and not seen as a danger. Most people, if given the chance to do so without consequences or anyone else knowing, seem to be fine with harming others for pleasure or personal gain. I only realized this when i started to spend more time on the internet and saw the true opinions of people in a place where they dont have to censor themselves out of fear of ostracization. Go to any gore video and
take a loon at the comments, people seem to love the misery of others. All of this was practically foreign to me before the internet, i couldnt fathom why people would act like that to eachother and why they would enjoy eachothers misery.

>>35279169
I honestly haven't felt empathy for anyone since my childhood. I see people doing stupid shit and I call them out on doing stupid shit, so if you're a single mom with 5 kids sucking government dick for money don't expect me to have a warm heart for you.


Another thing is that the whole empathy thing is a humongous meme. Maybe if you have a close group of friends it's not but the world doesn't run on empathy. It's dog eat dog regardless of how many pathetic limp wristed people say it isn't. Even nowadays we get our technology from the exploitation of others and their deaths and lives mean nothing to any of us. People like Ghandi were even killed by his own goddamn kind.


And before anyone says it, I'm not some clod that feels like rounding people up into death camps for shits and giggles (unless if you're ghetto trash or something but that's more of a euthanization thing) and I could acknowledge a situation not being optimal. But I can't feel empathy for anyone.

>>35279787
You're right in a way. People with empathy are often good for selfish reasons because they don't want to be in pain themselves, more than they don't want to cause it for others. It really just takes justification for someone with empathy to do what someone without it might do more naturally. But it doesn't mean it doesn't have many benefits and make it easier to be successful and happy if you have it.

I feel for you OP. I used to be like you until "something snapped" in my teenage years and i just stopped caring about people.

>>35279169
Empathy is not bad thing anon. Please don't try to purge yourself of it. The world needs more empathetic people.

>>35279507
literally this
I don't care about most people because I know they don't care about me, but at the same time there's just this burden within me to be good. It doesn't really seem beneficial to me though...

>>35281236

>there's just this burden within me to be good. It doesn't really seem beneficial to me though...

Couldnt have said it better. This is exactly how i feel as well

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>mfw finally starting to disassociate personality/sense of self through psychoactive drugs and mediation

I almost feel like I've lost the ability to achieve empathy with someone, it's really great. It's like the universe only exists within me and everything else is a hologram.

>>35281219
Empathy doesn't help the person who has it and expends their resources helping people who will likely not help them back in kind.
It's probably a leftover form of synergistic group selection behavior that doesn't work effectively anymore due to large, non homogeneous societies.
People will act like empathy is a positive trait as long as it's someone else who has to deal with having it, it's just a weakness and a limitation.

I feel you OP. I hope one day humanity is rid of either empathatic people, or of cruel people. Both existing together causes a lot of misery. I do really hope that it will be the latter, but i also realize that it will most likely be the former.

>>35282782
Yeah, in the end we will either have a synergistic society, or a competitive society.
It's possible that a fully competitive society will produce better offspring long term and be a better long term option even including the fact that cruel people will do better individually than empathetic people. It's quite possible that the society created by these people would not be in their own benefit though.

On the other hand you have the empathetic people who would possibly survive better as a group, develop faster and just generally be nicer to be around, but long term the lack of competition and backstabbing might result in worse offspring long term.

I want to say that I want the empathetic people to win out, but I almost think either extreme would be bad long term.

>>35282938

I agree with pretty much everything you said, the only thing i wanted to add is that i believe/hope that genetic modification (which will be commonplace before the end of this century) could allow us to engineer offspring to be both empathetic and superior in abilities. The thing is, will world powers, who will inevitably have full control over it, want to do that? Is empathy in the population in their best interest? Gene modification throws a big monkeywrench in predictions of future human evolution.

>>35283047
>Gene modification throws a big monkeywrench in predictions of future human evolution.
It really does if it's allowed to be utilized to it's full potential, but I think for precisely that reason it's use might be limited or at least extremely stunted until other nations start to use it to the extent that it cannot be ignored to compete.
I feel like it to some extent hinges upon those with power and influence over our current laws/morality, but maybe in time technology will just grow to the point that it can no longer be ignored, at least in the interest of short term profit.

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>>35279169
Sounds like sympathy, not empathy, you have sympathy for the weak and you attribute it to yourself as a self servicing quality you posses that others who you deem more happy/better/higher than you to lack as an explanation for your own failure to make a content life for yourself.

You turn your failure into a virtue and so you doom yourself to acceptance of a life you are not content with.

You are a weakling.

>>35279788
ENTP spotted

>>35284005

You're gonna have to cut out the pyschobabble, half of what you said sounds like you made it up on the spot.

All of you are misusing the word empathy, it's not what you think it means. It's being able to put yourself into someones mind, experience things from their point of view, vicariously emulate or reconstruct how they might feel and what they might think.

It doesn't have anything to do with feeling for someone but rather, being able to feel like someone else.

You don't 'feel empathy', you feel sympathy.

>>35284381

People use the terms interchangably, so yes, people here are talking about sympathy.

>>35284606
But they are not the same and the distinction is very important.

Empathy is a good thing to have regardless of your intentions to someone else. Not having it is a handicap, it disables development, people lacking it often lack impulse control and theory of mind, they are simpleminded. It's a handicap if anything.

Having a high level of empathy can also allow one to be especially cruel and deliberate, not possible without being able to assume the others point of view.

Sympathy is the trait soothsayers and manipulators use as their favorite poison, it's manipulative and self-serving or indifferent and self-serving more often than it is a genuine willingness to sacrifice for someone else without any personal gain.

>>35284381
>>35285430
It is really just that empathy is more encompassing. Feeling sympathy is an act of empathy.

>>35285430

Yeah like i said people dont actually think that two things are the same thing, they know that its two different concepts, they just use the words interchangably.