Empathy isn’t a feeling that happens to you, it’s a skill you practice.

Everyone knows about common human emotions. What you don’t know about a stranger is when they have those emotions and when they don’t. What most people think they’re doing when they say they’re being empathetic is engaging in projection. They’re imagining themselves in that situation and assuming the other person is feeling the same way they are.

Do I even have to tell you how often that’s wrong? Many, many people think another person is angry when they are angry and they project their anger onto the other person. It totally baffles them!

There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.

To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.

Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.

To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.

Most people have some degree of empathy: for their friends, family, and their in-group. There are plenty of people who don’t, though.

Empathy is the skill of the therapist, the con artist, the salesperson, the poker player. Not everyone is good at understanding other people’s emotions and motivations.

That’s also a form of empathy. You get that, right?

No, because doing badly doesn’t imply feeling badly. People going through bad times respond in a variety of ways. They don’t all respond exactly the same way.

Of course you can respond by donating to help people who have been affected by a disaster. Everyone does that. That’s what sympathy does for us.

Empathy is different! To truly have empathy for someone means to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do. It’s very difficult to achieve. Many married couples never reach it.

That’s not what empathy means. Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they are feeling, not to feel bad for them when they’re not doing well.

What you’re describing is more like sympathy.

You can’t develop empathy until you break out of the filter bubble. To understand a person you first need to know what their life is like, what motivates them, what values they hold.

Everything I’ve seen tells me that the opacity runs in both directions. Empathizing with someone who holds radically different, diametrically opposed values to your own is very difficult.

How often do you use it, if not every day? Once a week? Once a month?

I use my laptop every day so it makes sense that I don’t use the power button even though it’s right there. I also have a raspberry pi set up to run Retropie that I only turn on once or twice a year when I have an old friend in from out of town. In that case I use the power button every single time but I don’t mind that it’s kind of finicky (I have to turn on several other devices with it as well as a power strip to power them all) because I don’t use it that often.

I could see the new Mac Mini being a bit annoying with its bottom side power button if you’re using it every other day. But honestly I would be more annoyed at the boot time taking 30s than the 2s it takes to reach under the case and power it up. If I had one I would probably just get the keyboard with built in power button and finger print reader though. I use the finger print reader on my laptop all the time because it unlocks my password manager.

How often do you use the power button to turn on your computer? These days I might use it once a year, at most!

Especially if you plant open pollinated varieties which are true to seed. So nice being able to save seeds and get more plants next year for free! Doesn’t work with everything but it does work with a lot!

And now I’m just picturing myself cracking open a can of beer only for bees to start flying out!

Vaginal birth isn’t always excruciatingly painful. It depends on the mother’s body type and health but it can also be improved with a proper birth position. Humans weren’t evolved to give birth laying on our back like in the movies, we were meant to give birth in a squatting position.

Some women have even claimed that their vaginal birth was intensely pleasurable, causing them to achieve orgasm. Of course no one wants to hear this, as clashes with all sorts of taboos against women’s sexuality and giving birth in general!

Well you have to be deliberate about it. You need to actually practice the language outside of watching the shows/movies. But the content you’re watching is a strong motivator to continue learning. And then one day you turn the subtitles off!

Oh this is really cool. I didn’t know that! So foreign films brought to Poland are spoken over with a Polish translator, just like you’d have at the UN? That way you can hear the original actors and the translated dialogue in Polish?

How does this work for trying to learn a new language? I have heard of many people learning English by watching English movies and TV shows with subtitles in their own language. This allows them to listen to English and slowly start to pick up English words while still being able to understand what’s happening due to the subtitles. I myself am learning Chinese and I occasionally watch cooking videos in Chinese with English subtitles and find myself gradually picking up the Chinese words as I hear them.

I think this technique probably works best with shows and movies written for children, as those have much simpler dialogue to begin with.

This is the shit at the bottom of my compost pile that somehow managed to avoid breaking down!

I struggled a lot with watering early on! Overgrown plants in small pots have almost no water capacity in the soil. Plants you buy from the nursery are frequently overgrown for their containers and need to be transplanted relatively soon after you bring them home.

Also tricky is that if you put a plant in too large of a pot then the water capacity of the soil will be too high and then the plant can come down with root rot!

Now I’ve gotten used to checking the soil, especially at the bottom of the pot, for dryness and then watering as needed. It also depends on the plant species (plants can vary all the way from desert-loving dry species to fully aquatic plants)!

I’m a guy and I hate dealing with boys/men in online games too. I love Stardew Valley as well! The game got me interested in real life gardening as a hobby!

Putin has been in power for 25 years. He arguably has more enemies than anyone else on the planet. I’d say the deterrent factor is pretty strong with this one.

It’s not perfect though. When you’re destroying your own country with the most disastrous war in living memory then you need stronger deterrents.

I wonder if they’re afraid of Eternal September’ing the service. A lot of people on Lemmy were upset when a bunch of people on Reddit joined. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have millions join in one day. I doubt it would be good for the culture of the community!

Yeah this game is absolutely one of a kind. Nothing else like it. Really funny too, with great voice acting and a wacky story!

Despite all that I am really enjoying the rewatch. What makes the show great are the other characters: Al, Jill, and Wilson! Wilson is by far my favourite. Such a weird guy!