Empathy Is All Around; Just Look Closely
By Steve Lemeshko
Japanese internment camp at Topaz War Relocation Center, Utah. Credit: Ed Yourdon, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Empathy shapes our relationships, influences our decisions, and shows up in more places than we often recognize. Once you start noticing it—how it can be nurtured or lost—it’s hard to stop seeing it.
Before I go any further, let me quickly define what I mean by a few terms:
Sympathy is feeling for someone, a pity-based emotional reaction.
Empathy is feeling with someone, stepping into their perspective.
Compassion goes one step further; it’s empathy in action.
A Story About How I Discovered “Empathy”
Here’s a bit about me to frame where I’m coming from. What you’re reading now might look polished, but English isn’t my first—or even my second—language. I grew up speaking mostly Russian, but in Russian, we don’t really have a native word for “empathy.” What we do have are terms like “co-feeling” (сочувствие) and “co-suffering” (сострадание). Both express emotional responses to another’s pain, and to me, align more closely with sympathy. “Co-suffering,” in particular, carries deeper emotional weight, but it still lacks the perspective-taking of empathy or the action embedded in compassion. There’s another word, “mercy-heartedness” (милосердие), that resembles compassion—but again, it implies hierarchy. You help because you feel sorry for someone, not necessarily because you see them as equal. There are now loanwords from English for both empathy (эмпатия) and compassion (компассия), but they still feel foreign. They’re mostly used in academic texts or by young bilinguals, and even then, they often lack the resonance these words carry in English.
So when I first encountered the concept of empathy, it wasn’t intuitive. I didn’t grow up with the word. I had to look it up. Then I had to read studies, look at examples, and most importantly, see it in action. I had to practice it. And maybe that’s what gave me an advantage—a kind of beginner’s perspective. Empathy wasn’t some sacred cultural trait I inherited. It was a skill I had to build from scratch.
When I started writing for the Arithmetic of Compassion a little over a year ago, I had to live the concept. I wrote about ecological grief, war, climate denial, and slow violence. These weren’t abstract topics; they were stories that required narrative empathy. Writing them required me to bridge academic theory and lived human experience together. That’s when it clicked: empathy isn’t just a concept. It’s a practice. And practice is what makes the impossible possible.
We now know from research that narrative empathy and, its form, participatory storytelling, are among the most powerful ways to cultivate empathy. These aren’t just academic ideas. That’s what I was doing all along. They help us connect to others across distance, across species, across political lines.
But here’s the thing: like driving a car, empathy is a skill. You can’t expect to be good at it without ever getting into the driver’s seat. And the more you practice—by listening, by imagining, by writing, by engaging—the more confident and effective you become.
Empathy as a Tool
I want to take this even further. Empathy and compassion aren’t just feel-good ideas. They can be radical tools for critique—frameworks for analyzing injustice and offering meaningful alternatives. Empathy reveals the gap between how things should be and how they actually are. It lets us see who is being harmed and whose pain is being ignored, recognize injustice not just as a statistic but as lived pain that pushes us to respond. The core principle is the same: “treat others as you wish to be treated.” Yet it is as subversive and urgent as ever.
In a time of humanitarian crises and rising extremism, empathy is one of the first things to erode. Extremist ideologies, for example, don’t necessarily lack empathy; they just misapply it. They amplify affective empathy for the in-group while shutting it off for the out-group. This selective empathy creates dangerous binaries of us vs. them, so if we want to push back, we can’t rely on emotion alone. We need cognitive empathy—the deliberate, reflective process of understanding other people’s realities. It’s not just about feeling their pain; it’s about understanding how their experience differs from our own.
This also doesn’t just apply to humans. In compassionate conservation and ecological empathy, we extend this moral imagination to include the more-than-human world. I’d argue that ecological empathy might even offer a more inclusive framework than approaches like ecofeminism or queer ecology—not because it’s better but because it can unify and invite everyone in.
I’d even argue that this empathy/compassion framework, grounded in shared human capacities, not identity politics, might be more politically persuasive in some circles. Conservatives, in particular, may respond more positively to narratives that emphasize common humanity over group-based ideology. We know from climate communication research that framing matters—and empathy, when positioned as universal, inclusive, and practical, is a powerful frame.
Here’s what this all means: empathy and compassion, in all their forms, can guide how we understand and, thus, change the world. Whether we're facing ecological collapse or rising authoritarianism, these aren’t soft ideas. They are tools. And like any tool, they get sharper the more we use them. Maybe it sounds naïve. But maybe what we need isn’t fewer naïve ideas—we need more people brave enough to act by them.
For further reading, see the following articles:
Extremism and Empathy / March 20, 2025
Ecological Empathy / February 20, 2025
Forget Me Not: A Lesson About Valuing Lives of the Many and the Few / May 18, 2023