Empathy Via the Internet

I've been thinking for quite a while about how fragile reality is — how tens of millions of people can hold two completely different beliefs, whether it’s that capitalism is good or capitalism is bad, or that wealth should or shouldn’t be redistributed, or that our healthcare system is just fine, or that it's a complete mess. These paradoxical views show how fragile and malleable reality is, because what is true for me is not necessarily true for you. All of that is informed by how we see and understand and interpret the world.

The more you get into the weeds about these opposing viewpoints, the more you see very clearly that other people share our reality for fleeting moments, if at all. Maybe the people that you hold most dear — whether it's family or a spouse or a best friend — more frequently see things the way you do than the average person. But even then, they will experience different realities from yours, because they are people.

It is because of this that I believe the greatest gift you can give another person is to either instinctively share their reality, or to at least try. It can be incredibly powerful and humbling to empathize with anyone, and ask yourself why they feel the way they do and see if you can try to understand where they're coming from and make them feel seen.

Empathizing with people might be an innate habit, or it may be something you find that you have to work on at length. No matter where your skill set lies right now, practicing empathy will deepen your relationships and strengthen your capacity for understanding the people around you. In short, it will make you a better person — and I believe ultimately, it allows you to tap into your honed gifts and genuinely help people.

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It used to be that almost everything was informed by empathy. Take marketing: It used to be that a small group of people would gather in a room and try to come up with an ad campaign. They would be tasked with telling a story that will resonate with people. To do that, you have to understand people, not just one person, but the masses. What do they care about? What are the trends? Where are people's heads at? How can we speak to them in a way that resonates? Some marketing firms conducted surveys, others had test cases. But by and large, many of them used empathy to guess how people might react to their campaigns.

Now, however, there's so much data, especially when it comes to digital advertising. Because of that, many brands today are built from the bottom of the pyramid, up. They're built from the opinions of all of the customers up to the brands. People-powered marketing is the pervasive and most successful form of marketing right now: If you're using data and seeing how people react in real time, you can also iterate the messaging in real time and see how people react to that tweak. Because of that constant feedback loop, you start to give the people exactly what they want. 

That means everything we read and watch and buy, is more often than not a mirror of ourselves,  because the things that are being advertised to us and the articles that are being written for us are just empirically what we want. So much of the internet is simply own desires and biases and thoughts being reflected back to us, and it's going to tear us apart if we're not careful because whatever you are, you become more of that. In that process, we are becoming more self-focused and self-reinforced and less interested and curious about and respectful of the other side's opinion. In short, we’re becoming less empathetic. The sliver of common ground is becoming smaller and smaller. 

In part, the problem lies in the fact that mirroring is sympathy, not empathy. If someone tells you something that is bothering them, and while you can’t relate, you tell them you’re sorry to hear that without actually internalizing their pain, you’re not doing the work of really understanding where they’re coming from. Mirroring is about just saying, “Intellectually, I can understand that that's upsetting to you. I don't personally get it, but that sucks.” That can be helpful, but it's not the same as really seeing someone and relating. It’s not the same as feeling the pain that the other person is feeling in your gut.  

If you can understand why someone is upset, why wouldn’t you want to  really see that person and come to them from a place of mutual understanding to show them that? 

Mirroring hurts us in two ways. For one, it doesn't do anything for the recipient except bolster their viewpoint. But it also doesn't help you as the empathizer understand the other person any better because you're simply a wall. If you're not really thinking about it, you're helping the person feel sorry for themselves and moving on with your life, but you're not there with them, you’re not creating intimacy, and you’re not becoming a better person yourself. 

The Power — and Limitations — of Empathy in Business

Empathy shows up in almost every relationship in my life. It needs to, because I really try to make sure that I'm squeezing the juice out of every hour of my day. As a result, anyone that I spend time with is someone with whom I empathize or who empathizes with me, someone whose reality I share, or they make an effort to share mine. I don't like spending time in rooms or with people that just categorically don't share my reality, so empathy is the driving force behind every interaction I have. Life is too short to engage with people who are not willing to meet you where you’re at and see you as you are.

In business, however, the balance is more delicate because you need to take input from lots of people. The board of my company is composed of 10 really smart people who all give me advice about what to do next, and 94 percent of the time, the advice they give is really helpful. But six percent of the time, I find that I have to stick to my guns and my instinct. It’s just like getting input from friends or people you care about on any given topic: Sometimes you know yourself best and you have to stay true to yourself. 

With entrepreneurship, it's about never being bull-headed, and never thinking you know best to the point that you ignore the signs, the data, and the advice of those that you respect. But in the same breath, you have to be confident and you have to wake up every day believing in your thing more than anyone else. To that end, empathy is a bit of a double-edged sword in entrepreneurship. You have to be really careful to empathize, to listen, to take input, but to also stay true to your instinct and your vision than other people just might not see.

This also plays out when you’re leading a team. I'm a sole founder and in the beginning, I was the leader unequivocally. Now, however, there are senior people at the company who have been around for three years, and they know as much about the company as I do. So are they my equals or am I still the leader? Being collaborative is so important, but at the same time, companies and people need leadership and structure. If you don't take the risk of sticking your neck out, saying what you believe, and letting people fall in line, sometimes the people that you work with find themselves in a directionless state. 

The hardest balance I've had to find is showing respect to my peers and to my employees, and using empathy to underscore the fact that I value their opinion, but still being the boss and the leader. 

The Future of Empathy

I wrote an article a long time ago about an idea I had, which was sort of an anti-algorithm. Increasingly, the internet fits all of us like a glove and shows us exactly what we want to see, buy, and feel at any given time. In the next decade, there’s going to be pretty seismic changes where the internet can intuit what you want very immediately. I think it would be a really interesting, empathetic exercise to have something like a serial number that you could just trade with someone, whether they’re a friend or someone totally different than you, in order to experience the digital world through their eyes. 

Let me walk a mile in my opposite’s shoes for a week. What articles am I reading? What products am I buying? What songs am I listening to? If I did that exercise for a week, maybe I would come out the other side and at the very least understand why someone feels a given way. I might not agree, but I would ideally understand.

I firmly believe that if we all took a week out of our year to view our entire world — everything on our phone, everything on our computer, everything in our smart ecosystem, everything that we do digitally — as if it was for someone else, maybe then we could learn to think like that someone else, and maybe then we could learn to not fall into the death spiral of affirming our own beliefs and shutting out anything else. Our salvation lies in realizing that other people have just as firm and poignant and salient beliefs as we do, and that in their estimation, they're just as entitled to feel that way. 

The Future of Truth

As I noted, I’ve noticed a trend increasingly play out in e-commerce and marketing, but also in editorial and politics: People's beliefs or interests are getting tighter because of how they're being marketed to, and the ways in which the people serving the ads or content are constantly retargeting their data for a desired effect. Effectively marketing is and always has been brainwashing someone into wanting a certain product, but is very effective now. If you know how to do that, you have a lot of power through little more than your keyboard, and that’s scary.

I can very easily use data and run ads to help people see the world a certain way, but is what I’m pushing to them empirically true? There will always be a faction of people who disagree with me, and believe that I am wrong. Then, do I push my information to influence them to see things my way, or should I be empathetic and consider that perhaps they’re right, and I shouldn't play a role in trying to change their mind? 

How do I act, as the person who can help people think one way or the other? Do I do it more or less? Maybe the answer is not at all. One person thinking he or she knows best, doesn't, because there is no absolute truth and no one person's conceptualization of fair or true or equitable is correct because to another group of people, it is inequitable. I don't think steering really hard towards spreading what I believe is a truth is a good course of action, nor do I believe that trying to empathize with and spread the counter-truth is a good reaction. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

That responsibility asks much larger questions: What is truth? Or, from an advertising and consumer perspective, what do people actually need? What should I actually be marketing? What should people actually believe? More and more I have realized that there is no truth. There is no absolute. 

So where does that leave us? How do we want to educate people? What is important for people to read or understand or believe, or enforce? 

Here is the silver lining: If there is no truth, then the only truth is the truth you make. You have the ability to forge your own truth, and to seek out rooms and people that are willing to share in your reality and whose reality you're willing to share it. Anything can happen to you, and you can view it however you want. Your reaction to anything is your reality. 

You, as the individual, actually have complete autonomy and power to determine how you feel. You can't control the things that happen to you, but you can control the thoughts that you have after it happens, and therefore the feelings that you hold about that occurrence. You can, in short, be more empathetic toward yourself. 

That is how you begin to accept yourself. That is how you grow.