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Comment by brunooliv | Hacker News Reader

Oh God, I saw the title and was kind of scared of reading this... I mean, I'm young still, not married or anything, but, I think I am a very empathetic person and kind of like to be understanding of other people's lives and feelings, maybe because I feel it's a way of expanding my own life perspective or something, but anyway I was reading this and feeling pretty emotional during the whole thing and then I read the final sentence that Lilly said and I basically just... Started crying, so those were a few awkward minutes... It's an extremely raw and well-written piece... Ahh that's a strange way to feel on a Sunday...

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I don’t mean to police you and you probably don’t mean harm, but what you said and how you said it is bound to rub someone off the wrong way in the future.

In general, don’t tell people who are going through something that you empathize with their struggles, real and painful struggles which you have no share in suffering, because you benefit from their stories by making you wiser about life. It’s also presumptuous to say that you understand other people’s lives or experiences because you heard or read a small part of what they’re going through.

Empathy is about seeing another person as a dignified equal, making no judgments, sharing that person’s pain, and gaining nothing from it.

I'm sorry it apparently rubbed you off the wrong way, but I really meant no judgment or claiming that reading this makes me feel better about myself because I take valuable lessons from it while somehow being dettached from the real consequences as you rightly point out.

I ended up empathizing more peraphs because I have experienced some level of loss in my life both from family members and friends when I was very very young, and I feel that reading a text line this one many decades later probably triggered something in my subconscious in that I could probably understand how this dad was feeling in a way that I could not comprehend when I experienced those aforementioned losses when I was much younger.

I'm not claiming to understand his exact situation, I'm not married, I don't have kids and it's not something you can project or relativize in any way, we're on the same page there.

I just meant that understanding part of the feelings of grief and the innocent way that Lilly near the end of the article says she'd search every cloud just moved me in a way that I also found unexpected myself, that's all. I know I'm not special and I don't want to be or claim to be, because I know everybody will experience loss, but, simultaneously, this just hit me more than I expected it would which is what moved me to write the above comment, it was truly sincere.

I didn't take or see any selfishness in your comment. You can certainly empathize with someone and feel for them without having been in their shoes. That is the whole point of good writing (which you experienced). It is supposed to do that, to transport you there. You felt the author's lived experience and their is nothing wrong with that. It is supposed to expand your life experience and make you think.

You have nothing to feel ashamed about or to apologize for. The person who replied to you at best appears to have misunderstood what you said.

Oh knock it off.

Considering how I gave my piece as kindly as possible and how yours is just a self-assured dismissal, I think it's you who should knock it off. :)

Your comment didn't come off as kind. At best it just seems like you misunderstood the comment you were replying to.

You said: "...don't tell people who are going through something that you empathize with their struggles, real and painful struggles which you have no share in suffering."

The person you replied to didn't do this.

Misunderstanding is unkind? Did I misunderstand unkindly?

As I said in the previous comment, I think that the people dying on a hill to defend OP are completely missing the fact that people understand others’ statements according to their own circumstances. This is an inevitable limitation of the subjective human experience, and this is why no one can ever make the position that nothing that they say is offensive—you simply don’t know what others have gone through which they are using to understand the things you say.

I really don’t see what’s so different with what I’m saying with, say, some misunderstood law or policy at work or business requirement because the writer thought of the wording differently than the reader. I pointed out that there’s no need to demonize the commenter, but somehow people feel the need to protect him lol.

Then again, maybe you guys have been incorrectly called out on Twitter, but that doesn’t make you right in the same way that I’m not necessarily in the right here.

Stop. This has got to be the worst attempt at gatekeeping I’ve seen. Now we are not even allowed to have empathy! Just absolutely ridiculous.

You can absolutely empathize with people in more dire situations than you are. Why? Because we are perfectly capable of putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, because we can be compassionate, because we can be understanding, because we can _feel_.

Btw, that world you live in is absolutely terrible. Can you imagine if we couldn’t empathize with someone who lost a wife, or a son, or a loved one, because I didn’t? What a bleak, sad world you promote.

And do yourself a favor and look up the definition of empathy.

Why don’t you tell me what the definition of empathy is, and then go back to the comment that I responded to and show me how it is logically impossible to interpret it as the commenter making the struggle about him/herself, considering all the I’s she used?

For someone who supposedly has empathy, you care very little about how your own words (or those whom you agree with) can be seen in a different light by the simple fact that you don’t know what other people are going through, and people use their own experiences to interpret the meanings of things. Considering how there’s acknowledgement ob my end that maybe the commenter didn’t mean any harm, you’re overacting like your most basic freedoms are being trampled upon, which they aren’t.

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