The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

phubbing, or ignoring the people around you in favor of your phone.

cognitive empathy (understanding another person’s mental state) and affective empathy (responding emotionally to the other person’s mental state—i.e., sharing their feelings).

For those of us who have lived much of our lives online, giving up on the possibility of empathic connection via technology doesn’t feel like a real option.

Journalist and conversational expert Celeste Headlee has some ideas. In 2017 she published a whole book about fixing conversations, called We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter. When I called her to discuss it, she wanted to make one thing clear up front: “We are about to get a whole bunch of books and think pieces that blame tech

every time someone likes or comments on one of our posts—their magic of creating bridges is sometimes overpowered by their capacity to help us burn them.

even though they were constantly sending messages back and forth, none of these kids seemed to know how to talk to one another.

Instinctive empathy involved an uncontrollable emotional reaction to someone else’s experience—crying when someone else cries, for example, or blushing with secondhand embarrassment. Intellectual empathy was more distant: recognizing someone else’s emotion but not feeling it yourself.

we can’t ever really know what it’s like to be someone else. We can only know what it’s like to imagine being someone else.

Social technology is ostensibly about connecting people, but it doesn’t often foster the empathy that’s needed for real human connection.