Empathy is Not the Same as Sympathy

The world needs more empathy, not more sympathy.

Photo by Etienne Boulanger on Unsplash

I write a lot about how kindness, compassion, and empathy are desired by everyone, everywhere. In fact, there is not a person on the entire planet who doesn’t desire these.

It occurred to me that people often mistake empathy and sympathy. This is a hugely important distinction to make because empathy serves to make connection where sympathy creates disparity.

The difference is simple. Empathy involves recognizing, connecting, sharing, and striving for understanding. Whether this is thought, feeling, experience, situation, or what have you — the idea is that to empathize is to relate, to find and/or create understanding and a sense of being as if you can be in that other person’s shoes.

Sympathy, on the other hand, involves recognizing what the other person is thinking, feeling, or experiencing, but it’s unconnected. You aren’t making any effort to share, understand, or gain a sense of being in the other person’s shoes. It’s just to sympathize and make them feel seen. No connection is made. Frankly, this is superficial.

That’s why empathy empowers and sympathy doesn’t. Yet because these are mistaken and conflated as often as they are, I want to dive deeper into recognizing and understanding this and why…