I like how my friend, Linda Austin distinguishes between sympathy and empathy in her post, Sympathy vs. Empathy and the Importance of Memoir. I’ve often thought our empathy “muscle” is weakening because we don’t use it enough.

I also believe social media is a cancer upon empathy. How can we see through another’s eyes, feel what a person feels, with a 280-character post (X) or a snippet of information (Facebook, Instagram)? Even worse, AI makes it difficult to even know what’s true, and it’s getting worse. Even worse than that, the algorithms that determine what appears on our pages serves only to thicken the walls of our silos.

The sad thing is, most of us are not happy with the direction we’re headed, that is, to be driven further and further apart, with less and less understanding — not of the other side, but of each other.

Yet, we continue to walk a path that is pre-determined by those algorithms, blind to people who walk beside us, people who also wear blinders born by a lack of empathy.