anthropomorphism & discovering empathy.

I discovered empathy: wtf?

This blogpost highlights my under-developed brain, or perhaps some sort of autism, as i feel everyone else just knows this stuff.

I think i discovered empathy through the concept of anthropomorphism.

Most of us learned about this word in school. The most boring way to explain it is as a “literary device” where we transfer human qualities to non human entities such as animals, gods, or nature phenomena.

First of all, i hate that we call conceptual ideas “literary devices”. It’s literally making something thats about ideas and transfer of consciousness into a fucking gadget. “device”. Lol. A fucking vibrator is a device. A god damn milkshake machine is a device. Anthropomorphism is a psychological part of the human experience that attempts to understand the world around us. HOW IS THIS ALSO A DEVICE.

At this point, what is NOT a linguistic device?? If i say “hello neighbour”. It could be a fucking literary device: “HELLO, is a literary device used to greet other beings, humans or even gods”.

Anyway, anthropomorphism is basically us looking at a gorilla thats smiling, and thinking that it’s happy, when in reality gorillas show their teeth to threaten you.

Or in dog training people are often taught that DOGS DO NOT THINK LIKE HUMANS. And even though they often feel like small children, we cannot train them using human psychology.

So we are often warned of anthropomorphizing animals too much, as it can lead to misunderstandings. But here we get to my recent revelation:

I’ve been anthropomorphizing people.

I’ve been assuming people think like me, and placing my values and therefore judgement on other people.

I’ve assumed that people have similar motives to me.

Turns out, people do things and say things and think COMPLETELY differently to me.

I cannot assume MY motives on THEIR actions.

More often than not, people have some completely magical strange mysctical reasons to doing things that do not follow my logic at all.

I think that this is empathy.

Like there are literally millions of reasons and life experiences that affect us in so many different ways.

I think that unlocking this feeling is a part of my journey of thinking about free will.

We are just increasing our own anger by thinking if we were in their position we would do things differently.

Let’s take someone sitting on the bus with their backpack on the seat next to them.

You can either sit with your own anger inside yourself:

“WHY DO THEY HAVE THEIR BAG ON THE SEAT, THAT’S NOT WHAT I WOULD DO. THEY ARE SO RUDE RIGHT NOW. GOD. THIS PERSON ONLY THINKS ABOUT THEMSELVES. FUCKING SELFISH PRICK.”

But maybe they have some other mystical reason that we are not aware of for their behaviour. An empathic approach to this would be something like:

“Hmm, there is a million reasons why they could have their bag next to them. Maybe i should try to assume that they either have a good reason, or just forgetting. Maybe they are having a panic attack right now and literally are thinking about dying, maybe they feel uncomfortable with some stranger sitting right next to them, perhaps they have some trauma they deal with.”

This whole empathy thing is literally making me a little bit happier, so i cannot recommend it enough.

Let’s be nicer.