In a world where we ask technology to think for us—where time is money and everything has a price—we don't just sacrifice knowledge. We also forfeit our capacity for empathy: our ability to understand and share the perspectives of others, and to think not just for our own good, but for the good of those around us.
Through the experience of grief, Embrace President and CEO Imari Paris Jeffries, Ph.D., rediscovered why empathy remains a central pillar to the human experience. In his latest contribution to The Fine Print, he explains why that ability to care for others remains the key to creating the democracy we deserve.
Here’s an excerpt of Imari’s piece. (Read the full article on our website.)
Grief in a zero-sum America
By Imari Paris Jeffries, Ph.D.
When my father died three years ago, I turned to scriptures, literature, and poetry. I turned to the essays of James Baldwin and the novels of Toni Morrison. I found myself returning to the poet Dylan Thomas, who wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The line was permission of sorts to feel the defiance inside grief. Permission to understand that love does not surrender quietly.
I turned to the questions that philosophy, literature, and religion have asked for centuries about mortality and what remains when a voice you love goes silent. Grief, I learned, is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be endured. After the death of his wife, C.S. Lewis wrote, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Words helped me live inside the disorder of loss without pretending it was neat. I am a person who likes things orderly. Grief was not. It refused to accept timelines and my order of operations.
The humanities reminded me that I was not the first son to bury his father, and I would not be the last. They placed my sorrow inside a larger human story. My son and daughter will one day bury me. That, too, is part of the inheritance of being human in this world.
And yet, what feels intimate and sacred in our own lives often feels distant when it belongs to someone else.
We watch the loss of life. We see the pain of others and do not care. We watch, and we swipe, endlessly. I sometimes say this moment in our history is defined by a poverty of empathy. A season when zero-sum thinking dominates our civic imagination. A belief that if one group’s story is told, another’s must be erased. That memory is a competition.
But perhaps there is no poverty at all. Empathy is not scarce. It lives in most of us. It shows up in hospital rooms and kitchens, at funerals and in quiet acts of care. What we are witnessing is not the absence of empathy, but its distortion. Its denigration. Its manipulation by those who benefit from convincing us that someone else’s dignity endangers our own.
The real danger is not that we cannot feel for one another. It is that we are being trained not to. Trained to see every gain others make as our own loss. That seeing their story told threatens to take away from ours. That every act of remembrance for someone else subtracts from our memory.
