By focusing on things around you and the world as a greater whole, you’ll naturally be more empathetic, help people more, etc. If your only obsession day after day is improving yourself or improving your “thoughts” via education to get yourself out of the grind, then you’ll be less happy. “This job will make me happy. This profession. This commitment to an idea.” But doing those things only incurs a further grind.
The only thing to do is accept that “this is water” and attempt to reason about the implications from there. I think empathy and caring are natural consequences of that type of displacement from individual satisfaction or understanding and a desire to better understand the world naturally leads to more empathy.
If your goal is to understand your world rather than “conquer” it ideologically, you’ll naturally be kinder and more empathetic to your neighbor.
A writer would attempt to better understand the world and communicate it to the people they love. Repeatedly failing (in your own eyes) to properly communicate is incredibly disheartening, so I wouldn’t say the absolute goal here is your own satisfaction.