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

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

Franchesca Ramsey, an activist and actress who gained fame from a series of viral YouTube videos, writes about this poignantly in her book Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist.

This reaction tends to be less common with tragedies that affect larger groups of people, a phenomenon sometimes called the “collapse of compassion.” Experts think this happens because we automatically regulate our emotional reactions when we expect them to be overwhelming.

“Empathetic people are happier, more self-aware, self-motivated, and optimistic. They cope better with stress, assert themselves when it is required, and are comfortable expressing their feelings. There was only one scale where non-empathetic people scored higher: Need for Approval.”

had first started talking to friends and strangers on the internet via AOL Instant Messenger in the early 2000s. I’d rush home from middle and then high school every day to message people I may or may not have even made eye contact with in the halls. I’ll admit I was a bit of a fanatic early adopter, but I wasn’t alone—there were always at least a

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.

millennials. One of the most prominent voices sounding the alarm about the connections between technology and a lack of empathy is probably Sherry Turkle, a researcher, writer, and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has compared the impact of technology on our ability to communicate and empathize with one another to environ

Another friend, a woman, scolded me for not defending her husband in a debate about the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. You have a lot of learning to do, she said to me, before blocking me and never speaking to me again.

compassion is feeling for someone; empathy is feeling with them.