Azra remembers most of the details about the night in 2021 when she started to feel too much. “I was in our basement watching ‘The Crown’ and scrolling my phone and drinking the last bag of fancy tea my sister had sent me for my birthday. We’d come back from spending Thanksgiving with my husband’s family. I saw a news item about a young guy who killed his entire family: mother, father, 15-year-old sister.” And then she was on the floor crying harder than she’d ever cried in her life. “My husband ran downstairs because he thought one of my parents had died. He kept asking, ‘What’s wrong? What happened?’ and I didn’t know. I couldn’t stop.”
She wasn’t previously a big crier, Azra says; and, for better or worse, as a high-school administrator she was so accustomed to hearing about mass shootings that she sometimes worried about growing callous to news of them. Her family had emigrated to the United States from the former Yugoslavia, and she and her sister were in grade school when the Serbo-Croation war began. “My grandparents were still there, and every day I asked my father if they were still alive until he got mad and was like, ‘Stop asking me this.’ From him I got the belief that strength was keeping pain and death and war sealed off from the rest of my thoughts.”
That first basement crying jag kicked off months in which Azra’s emotional dams were obliterated by a kind of all-purpose sorrow that never seemed to fully ebb. “I would talk on the phone to my parents and cry because I saw images in my head of their death,” she says. “The parent of one of my students died from COVID, and I felt physically sick from trying not to cry when I saw him.” She couldn’t watch the TV shows she watched before, couldn’t concentrate on work, and had no appetite. Leaving the house felt risky. “If I was on the bus and there was a crying baby or child, I panicked because I knew I would start crying with them.”
She wasn’t pregnant, wasn’t anemic, wasn’t hormonally imbalanced and didn’t have a brain tumor. She took a leave of absence from work, and her doctor prescribed Zoloft, which clouded over her mental images but didn’t dull the invasive feelings. “I couldn’t find a way to fill my time that wasn’t going to also make me cry,” she says. (The one laugh Azra remembers from the time happened when her husband proposed they join a pickleball club.) On the suggestion of a friend, she made an appointment for a deep-tissue massage. “She asked if there was any place I was feeling tense or blocked and I burst into tears and said ‘Yes, everywhere.’ At the end she said she thought I was an empath and was expressing pain that wasn’t mine but that I could feel. I was like, ‘OK, that doesn’t sound like me at all, but I’ll look into it.”
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The internet was newly full of empaths at the time — people who described themselves having a heightened sensitivity to the emotions and stressors of those around them that caused them to keenly experience the pain, anxiety and grief of others. Instagram Reels and TikToks bearing the hashtag #empath were full of explainers (“6 signs you might be an empath”, “The empath-astrology connection”) and advice for empaths on protecting their peace and setting boundaries with others. As with so many self-applied labels that enter the cultural lexicon via social media, “empath” isn’t a particularly precise term; in this case, its origins are literally fantastical: The term seems to have originated in science fiction in the mid-20th century to describe characters with a supernatural ability to feel what others are feeling, telepaths of mood and emotion who were often overwhelmed and not sure what emotions actually belonged to them.
That humans feel things deeply and are driven to connect to other humans and feel a responsibility to the world was once a thing that could, for the most part, go without saying. But it’s undeniable that a dearth of empathy has become a feature of 21st-century life.
UCLA psychiatrist Judith Orloff’s 2017 book “The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People” ushered the concept into the self-help realm. Orloff described the empath as an emotional sponge that can become so saturated with other people’s pain and stress that it becomes their own, and maintained that developing the self-awareness to identify where the sensory information they absorb originates, and why, is key to thriving as someone who feels more than the average person. Before that, the 1996 book “The Highly Sensitive Person” tackled more or less the same subject: Its author, clinical psychologist Elaine Aron, identified Highly Sensitive People, or HSPs, as those whose sensory-processing systems are often overwhelmed by stimuli.
There’s no diagnostic criterion for empathy. Consensus seems to place it under the broad heading of neurodivergence, and the most well-known research into what might make HSPs and empaths tick came from the identification of mirror neurons in the 1990s. In the 2018 Vice documentary short “Empaths,” developmental psychologist Michael Pluess calls empathy “a fundamental social skill that we all have,” but adds that there are people whose brains are so sensitive that “they cannot not feel empathy.” But investigative journalist Hannah Ewens’ interactions with a handful of people who have professionalized their empathy portray an unavoidable paradox: Demonstrating the possession of what Ewens calls a “superpower” inevitably takes the form of performance. She follows David Sauvage, a New York City–based empath who does live readings in a gallery, charges $200 an hour for private sessions and leads empath meetups where attendees say things like, “We are the sensitive people that are here to kind of save the planet.”
That humans feel things deeply and are driven to connect to other humans and feel a responsibility to the world was once a thing that could, for the most part, go without saying. But it’s undeniable that a dearth of empathy has become a feature of 21st-century life. A 2010 University of Michigan study found that college students reported levels of empathy that reflected a decrease of 40% from those reported in previous decades. In 2006, then-senator Barack Obama drew attention to what he called a national empathy deficit; the willful memory-holing of how much humanity was literally and figuratively lost with COVID and the impact on health-care workers has led to a prolonged state of compassion fatigue.
Interdependence with others is anathema to the project of American neoliberalism, with its emphasis on the private sector and determination to view systemic problems like poverty as individual struggles that are won by force of will alone. Technology originally theorized as a revolutionary conduit for connection has been harnessed to monetize conflict. And the shibboleth that a rising tide lifts all boats might as well now be socialist propaganda. As child psychologist Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz emphasized in 2010’s “Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential — and Endangered,” the problem isn’t just less empathy among individuals, but a policy-level disinterest in understanding why it’s necessary: “Failure to understand and cultivate empathy . . . could lead to a society in which no one would want to live — a cold, violent, chaotic, and terrifying war of all against all . . . And it’s a culture that we could be inadvertently developing throughout America if we do not address current trends in child rearing, education, economic inequality, and our core values.”
Technology originally theorized as a revolutionary conduit for connection has been harnessed to monetize conflict. And the shibboleth that a rising tide lifts all boats might as well now be socialist propaganda.
The Trump administration and the MAGA movement have embraced overt anti-empathy as its defining stance, and the Christian nationalists, eugenicists, business leaders, and proud bigots who have the president’s ear now rail against empathy as a sin and a cancer. Elon Musk believes that “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy,” and the idea that Democrats and progressives have made empathy “toxic” has become one of the right’s favorite talking points. The characteristics of empathy that Leslie Jamison laid out in her 2014 essay collection “The Empathy Exams” — “Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see” — are all ones that have been bullied and belittled and sh*tposted out of the room. Lack of empathy isn’t a roadblock; it’s the finish line.
There is a generation growing up that can see and hear incuriosity, shameless lying and lack of both perspective and humility with which the nation’s leader talks to and about other people. They can see and hear how government officials insult, lie about, and dehumanize other Americans. And they can see and hear that powerful, wealthy people are engineering a future in which there’s no longer a value proposition in humans relative to machines. But the people in power can only continue to be in power if the rest of us cease to trust, listen to and organize with each other. The rallying cry that there are more of us than there are of them feels hopeful only as long as people can organize, but hypercapitalists have a strong incentive to ensure people can’t or won’t — whether that means criminalizing protest and killing protesters or ensuring that Americans simply don’t have enough time, money, or health to push back.
Azra was relieved when she was finally able to stop crying. She was equally relieved to find out that she isn’t an empath after all. “I think I did know that, but of course I went down the rabbit hole anyway,” she says. “Being aware of all the suffering, and all the horror of the world — we’re not supposed to have all that awareness. I definitely didn’t want it. Being maybe more sensitive than the average person is a way to say you have a reason to shut down.” Most of the clarity she found in her journey through the empath-sphere came from other non-empaths: “The people who . . . not that they were making fun of empaths, but the people who were like ‘OK, what if you’re not an empath, what if you’re just a person who feels helpless to do anything big and that comes out as hypersensitivity to smaller things?’ Aren’t we supposed to be affected by those big things?”
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the science of feeling
