Empathy and Sympathy

I'm Edward Nelson, and this is a way of looking at empathy and sympathy. Empathy and sympathy are often linked, but they're also slightly different. Okay? So I want you to think about. This is a river, and it's a metaphor for feeling or emotion. And, you know, this river is speeding along. And inside the river, we've got. Let's just call him Carl. Carl's stuck in the river. He's got lovely red hair, red curly hair, and he's waving out for help. He's floating down the river. Now, here's us. Let's just say this is me standing on there. I've got a Mohawk today, standing on the side, and I see Carl. Now, there's a couple of different things that I can do in response to that. I can just stay there. If I just stood there and did nothing, maybe sat down, crossed my legs and maybe read a book, read the newspaper, saw him go by, didn't do anything, that would be apathy. Okay, we're not looking at apathy. We're looking at empathy and sympathy. So the other way, other thing I might do is that here's a river over here, okay? And this is my feelings and my emotions. Now I can go and jump in the river as well and go, oh, isn't that terrible? Oh, this is an awful thing to be doing. Now that, for me, that is sympathy. Okay, but what if we just imagined what it would be like? We thought about what it would be like if it was us. So here's a little. When we're not actually jumping in, we're not actually having feelings, we're being aware of what it would feel like if we were them. And that is when we are being empathic. So we're not getting sucked in. We're not jumping in their river and getting drawn into their story or having feelings about their story, like, oh, it's really bad. I'm really sorry for you. We're just going. We're just understanding what it's like to be them. It's a key thing. So that's one way of thinking about the difference between sympathy and empathy.