ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling

After reading the other comments, I gotta point out that asking us to describe empathy is like asking a shark what swimming feels like. Its just something we do, 24/7. Sure, some people learn to be less empathetic because it interferes with their job, but doing that is sort of like not thinking of a specific thing—you can do it, but you have to take a roundabout method to accomplish it and you have to stay vigilant the entire time.

If i had to try, I would focus on how children experience empathy. The usual path of developing empathy in children has a number of distinct steps:

1. As a toddler, you do something mean to another kid, but this makes the other kid cry. Seeing the other kid cry makes you feel bad. You don't like feeling bad, so eventually you learn to not do mean things.
2. As a preschooler, you start exercising your newly-formed cognitive abilities to try doing things that are nice, possibly even considerate. You learn that making other people happy feels good, so you start finding all sorts of different ways to make other people happy. Some kids decide they prefer helping, others like giving gifts, and a few start to get really good with compliments.
3. Around second grade, you start developing the ability to put yourself in other people's shoes. Some kids don't explore this much, others spend a lot of time thinking about how other people feel. Generally at this point kids are very concerned about fairness, but being aware that other people might see the world differently from them makes fairness more complicated than "everybody gets the same"
4. As a teenager and later as an adult, you start using this to form moral ideas. This is why morality is a touchy subject for most adults; it's more felt than anything. Realizing your moral priorities are misaligned can feel like realizing you can't tell purple and magenta apart. In addition, at this point you get a finely tuned sense for social dynamics, and you may start reacting to social blunders with the same level of pain as watching someone else stub their toe. Many people fold this into their moral systems, or even prioritize this social empathy over the emotional empathy from steps 1 and 2.

My understanding of your situation is that you skipped steps 1 and 2. You are capable of putting yourself in other people's shoes, so you can in fact do the stuff that empathy lets us do as long as you take the long way around. You also can read the room perfectly well, and then use that to react appropriately. Similarly, I'm autistic and didn't get to participate in steps 3 and 4, but I can still put myself in other people's shoes with a bit of imagination and a lot of effort. I make serious blunders sometimes by forgetting that other people have different likes and dislikes than me, but most of the time I get things right.

You know, one of my favorite things about this sub is that half the posts here are trolls accidentally telling on themselves so I can block them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-3fSAZ-66A

I would love to be surrounded by communists and be able to have interesting debates with people who actually care about being right, unlike the right

For once, no.

Skillet has made some cool stuff, Future of Forestry has made some good Christmas music, and I guess Owl City counts as a Christian band now

This is going to confuse archaeologists in the distant future

Free radicals are essentially ionized molecules. So radical Islam is just like normal Islam but missing an electron.

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The last commenter clearly hasn't heard of Onision

Wow, alien mummies!

I think a community like this is better served by dbzer0 (the instance I am from). Might want to pack up and move there, if possible. Lemmy.world skews very neoliberalish.