Maybe this is sociopathic, maybe it's autistic, maybe something else. Anyway, I feel nothing about large scale atrocities going on in the world. I'm not provoked by police massacring demonstrants or similar. I was never angered or provoked in any way by the Iraq war, but I didn't care much for 9/11 either. Usually when things like that happen, a war breaking out etc, I'm excited and hope for it to escalate.

I tend to gloat when tragedy befalls people who are so ordinary they never even considered other perspectives in life. Like for example fatal accidents at high-school graduate parties, kids crashing into trees dying the same night they got their driver's license and borrowed daddy's car, charter tourists being swallowed by tsunamis, football arena incidents etc.

When something like a school shooting occurs, I enjoy following the news as a passive observer. I like the ensuing chaos without rooting for either side or wanting to get involved myself. Also let me point out I would never do anything similar myself, but I'm still excited by the amount of disorder it generates.

Even though I would never cross the line and physically harm someone else, other than in self defence, I keep getting adrenaline rushes from reading about terrorism and similar in the news, but there's also another side to it.

Here's the contradictory thing. There are people I care for, I also care for animals. There are even lots of instances where I end up sympathizing with strangers who are the victims of some kind of individual tragedy. This is a weird thing because sometimes if for example a couple loses their child in an accident, I gloat because I deem those people "bad" just based on what impression they give. At other times I feel deep sorrow and sympathy because I feel the people are "good". This is how my attitude towards others work in general. There's a middle zone where I can be polite and emotionally neutral, but a lot of times I tend to either like or hate people. Sympathy or gloating.

Also, I always sympathized with cartoon and fictional people more than with real life people. I still cry, at the age of 26, when a cartoon child loses his mother, but I'm indifferent towards a lot of real people. This last part I suspect has more to do with autism than sociopathy.

You are just too attached to self-righteousness.

From how I see it, self-righteousness is a result of lack of empathy, not the other way around.

Whatever is most convenient for You.

Soleiyu - I think I understand your position on mass tragedy. I am from the US, and 9/11 didn't really affect me at all. I sympathized to an extent with the Columbine school shooters. But, just the same, I feel no violent desires or wishes to inflict harm or suffering on others. The frantic nature of a disaster is simply exhilarating. I am the same way when it comes to natural disasters. George Carlin actually had a joke that talked about something like this. I think it is just part of who I am. I really fancy dark humor and the excitement that comes from disaster.

Is it just me, or is it normal for someone to not care about something until it directly affects them? As far as I'm concerned, people either lack empathy only until an event of some kind directly affects them, or they are naturally empathetic. Perhaps there are different ways that we show empathy towards others?

I'm sure it varies, but it certainly seems as though empathy only shows up when something becomes personal. I guess it is instinctual to only worry about what we perceive as an immanent threat or concern. After all, humans are a pretty self-serving, as well as self-preserving, species. What good would it do us to try and empathize with every single person on Earth?

i tend to agree to tricky.

the reason why i do is because i know i am very empathic, but i do not feel charity for ppl i dont know just like you Soleiyu. why would i? theres so many fucking assholes and if thousand ppl die in an explosion im pretty sure at least 900 of them are wasted biomass anyways. and its not like any of theese ppl would care about me.

however i feel sorry for ppl who lived through shit and are being shit on again - that again is because i can imagine how they feel
i simply cannot feel sorry for anyone and i focus more on ppl that i can relate to.

if you take it the other way theres enough little crybaby bitches in TV that are horrified by just anything and cant stop crying about it. why? they dont make me belive that they could imagine the pain or did ever spend enough thoughts on bad things to have a realistic picture of the situation. they are just whimps with no clue and not very empathic in any way if you ask me. they just "ride" the emotion instead of thinking about it

I think it's normal to not feel empathy for people you don't know. I don't. I lack empathy, at least for the most part for people I don't care about and that's to be expected. I do, however, feel empathy for the people I value and care about.

I wasn't particularly affected by 9/11 either. It shocked me like it shocked everyone else but I wasn't crying a river over it. I think what most people (who weren't directly affected) did during that time was squeeze out crocodile tears and pretend they care more than they do because that's how they felt they should react.

of course a tragedy is a tragedy but once someone is dead the worst part lies behind him/her. id rather die fast than bleed around for hours in unbearable pain.

but i guess it depends if you have something you want to live on for by any means - i dont

Neither do I. The only reasons I'm alive are because a) it would upset my parents, and b) I'm too much of a coward anyway.

Absolutely nothing. That's way too big of a task. Try empathizing with people you meet. I tend to make a lot of friends that way.

i meant everyone not anyone...


but talking about humans as a selfish race: i dont think humans are like that by nature. in fact nearly all animals are like that for a certain degree.
the problem is that ppl can afford to be bad motherfuckers that do not care about anything nowdays. neither other ppl nor other creatures or anything else.
in early history we had to stick together to survive since we had no natural efficiency like a bear would with its thick hide and giant claws. or a cat of prey with its superior perception. nearly any animal has better perception to begin with. and when it comes to survival, perception is most useful. in modern warfare like in natures jungle - the one who is spottet first got the short straw.
becoming an outcast for stealing or lying was very common in early cultures. as far as i know the native americans also banished persons as outcasts if they gambled their place in the tribe away through lying and stuff like that.

life is too easy for selfish assholes, in fact modern living is better for assholes than for nice or good ppl anyways (well lets say since medival time not only nowdays). i only know assholes with a lot of money. only assholes got the asshole to make money with being an asshole.

I agree with everything you said in that post, Soleiyu. I feel nothing for those huge incidents, and I actually feel a bit lol-ish when something like a high school party murder or a kid in a car crash happens, just because I can kind of be like "BAM, REALITY, BITCHES."

But "good" people and people I care for are a different story.

haha true especially the "BAM" part xD

I sometimes dream about living in a small village community where people actually did this. Not stone age style exactly but a self-sustaining community with a village council and some craftsmen and farmers. Like in the movie The Village. I would be the village shaman or priest.

i often daydream about this kind of living. you know you wake up with the sun and you go out scouting for the local droves. you jump through the wood at the feet of a mountain and breath the fresh air while the winds blows through the tribal jewelry in your hair. but that doesnt distract you from scanning the area for threads, perceptive with the poisoned arrow steady, and you know youre not gonna miss since your the freakin best hunter in the village.
id like to be bowman scout or woodcrafter!

it doesnt even have to be a tribal village i could also think of living in a little community like in a japanese village with one or two dojos you can choose from. a market every week brings life and outside goods into the little town.

id also like the idea of an norsemen-like village of hunters and gatherers.

well in the end its all daydreaming i wouldnt even survive two weeks without medcine against my asthma, haha -.-

We do. It's called HikiCulture.

You inspired me to make a thread.

One of the only "symptoms" of ASD's that I don't have myself is a lack of empathy. I'm very empathetic most of the time, probably too much so. It's one of the reasons I doubt whether I could be diagnosed, because I definitely do not have lack of empathy. I've always been very sensitive & am affected deeply by things that happen to other people. But, I've "met" a lot of people on ASD forums, etc. who also have empathy, & were diagnosed with an ASD. I definitely do not outwardly express my empathy. Most of the time, I do come across as unfeeling, or detached when something horrible happens, even though internally I'm in horrible pain from it. People see me as cold, or even cruel, when that's the opposite of the fact.

However, although I do have immense empathy in most situations, there are times when I don't feel as strongly as I probably should feel. When 9/11 happened, it didn't affect me much. It happened in another state & no one I know was involved in it & because of that, I wasn't affected as badly as it seems most others were. I feel bad that it happened, & wish that it hadn't happened, but it wasn't something that cut to the core like it seems to have most others in the U.S.-- even those who were not directly affected by it, like me.

But I definitely don't feel happiness at other people's pain. There are times when I feel they deserved it, especially if they were bad people, but I usually feel bad when something bad happens to someone, & definitely never good. I know a horrible person-- someone who beat her children throughout their entire childhoods & was never punished for it-- who got cancer. I wasn't happy when she had cancer, even though I absolutely despise her as a human being. But I wasn't sad she got it, either because I think she, & others like her, deserve whatever bad things befall them.

Sometimes I'm not sure if I feel anything or not when it comes to horrible events, but I think that no one deserves to suffer, no matter what they have done. Life is pretty disturbing and there's really no way to permanently avoid being in pain. On 9/11, it felt bad not knowing if my family members were alive or dead until they walked through the door. I thought everyone had died. After that, I didn't think about it much and ignored stuff related to it, but one night a few years later, I was looking at a photo album and saw an old picture of my family on the ferry with the old WTC in the background, and I couldn't help but cry. Every time I look at lower Manhattan I physically feel sick, and I'm sure that thousands of other people feel the same way.

Amen


"We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubling dream; it may be so at the moment after death."
Nathaniel Hawthorne

I have strange empathy problems with people. No matter how much I'd care for them, I systematically fail to empathise with their experiences. I feel like I lack the ability to rationally try to figure out what they might be feeling like. So often I might say things like "don't complain, things could be worse" or "try to deal with it" without really realising how my response might come off as. Sometimes I might feel something. But never in the case of people I know and care about.

My empathy problems come probably from my life experiences which have made me quite self-centered. But that is not how I'd wish to be. Caring for someone a lot, yet failing to be nothing but a machine that talks about myself... it has hurt me a lot. Perhaps I have some unconscious belief that all humans are evil and do not deserve empathy because I have been badly treated by so many of them. But I love animals, all non-human ones. They never hurt me, quite the opposite.

I feel the same way. But you know what they say, one death is a tragedy but one million is just a statistic.

Or what George W. Bush liked to call them, every day of the week while in office- "sacrifices".

Shit happens. There is truth in those witless and unoriginal words. Shit happened in the past, shit is happening now, and it will continue to happen in the future.
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." And those who have learned from history are doomed to watch repeats.
It's hard to care about a world that I've never belonged in. I don't wish anything bad on other people, I sometimes even feel pity, but I can understand how it can all become meaningless.
And I doubt those who say they do care. Have you ever seen people cry at funerals of people they never knew? The tears are probably for themselves. Such tragedies make them think of their own mortality, and they cry over this glimpse of their own futility.
People who know the rules of this stupid game can't cry anymore. It all seems like a ridiculous joke.

Bit fucking moody I know. Must think happy thoughts. Fluffy kittens. Blow jobs. A fluffy kitten giving me a blow job. Nooooo that's just wrong.