Empathy and Social Media

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed something that has stayed on my mind.

Especially in many group conversations and one-on-one discussions within my personal life, I’ve seen conflicts arise through digital communication that might have been avoided.

It almost feels as though we are becoming less and less empathetic toward one another.

Social media itself is not the problem.

The real problem is our decreasing willingness to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

We sit on one side of a screen, writing a comment or sending a message. On the other side is another person we cannot see. We often miss their facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. As a result, we don’t know what emotions may have led them to write what they did, and we also fail to notice how our own words might affect them.

I often feel that we become so focused on ourselves. We want to explain our point of view, express our opinion, or simply let out our frustration. And that’s perfectly okay. But we seem to take less and less time to ask ourselves why the other person wrote what they did or how their life experiences may have shaped their perspective.

In my opinion, this is one of the reasons why conflicts arise so easily today. People feel unheard, misunderstood, or excluded.

Small misunderstandings turn into heated arguments, even though many of these conflicts might never have happened if both sides had taken just a moment to truly listen to one another.

To me, empathy does not mean agreeing with everyone or approving of every behaviour. Quite the opposite. Empathy means making an honest effort to understand another person, to understand why they think, feel, and act the way they do.

This is exactly how I approach my counselling sessions.

When people come to me because of a conflict, my goal is not to decide who is right. Instead, I try to understand both perspectives. I want to understand why each person experiences the situation the way they do.

Quite often, something begins to change the moment people feel that their emotions and perspective are genuinely acknowledged, and when they gain insight into why the other person reacted the way they did.

I wish we would develop a little more empathy for one another. That we would more often ask ourselves what may have led another person to see the world from their perspective.

I don’t believe that empathy would make every conflict disappear. But I do believe it could make our world a little kinder.