Recovering Empathy: Seeing One Another’s Pain in a Numb Age

With a Subtitle: In a noisy, numb age, can we recover the lost art of entering another's pain?

A brief Excerpt: We live in the most connected age in history, yet many have never felt more alone. This reflection asks whether we have lost the art of entering another person's pain, and points toward the presence that begins to heal it.

The Author is: Anne Hope

Editor’s note – We run this piece because it names something many of us feel but rarely say aloud: that in the most connected age in history, we have somehow grown numb to the people right beside us. The author writes not as a theorist but as someone freshly acquainted with grief, and that honesty is what earns our attention. It is a gentle summons back to presence, and to the God who never ignores our pain.

Good Grief

Good grief! What do you do when your world is falling apart?

A bad diagnosis. A death in the family. A shattered dream. Unemployment. Betrayal. Loneliness. Depression. Anxiety. A child in trouble. A marriage in crisis.

I recently experienced the unexpected death of a close friend. I was in stunned pain and shock. Yet before the funeral flowers had wilted, people were already moving on with their lives. Social media feeds kept scrolling. News cycles kept spinning. The world never paused. The world never felt much of anything.

Grief, however, doesn’t move at the speed of the internet. Neither does healing.

Once upon a time and not so very long ago, when tragedy struck, people gathered on front porches. Neighbors showed up with casseroles. Friends sat quietly beside the grieving. Communities carried one another through hard seasons and were the heart of human life.

We live in the most connected age in human history, yet many people have never felt more alone. Our toxic individualism often places personal comfort and advancement above the common good, and at the expense of compassion and empathy.

Loneliness has become an epidemic, with people searching for companionship online instead of with “skin.” And let me tell you…it doesn’t get any better the older you get. The emotional cost is immense, leaving people isolated and communities fractured.

Today, I can’t help but wonder if we’ve lost something. Not kindness entirely. Not compassion completely. But perhaps we’ve lost the art of entering another person’s pain.

Editor’s note – The author’s instinct here is a deeply Biblical one. Scripture never treats grief as a problem to be scrolled past; it commands us to “weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15). The art of entering another’s pain is not a lost social skill so much as a form of love we are called to practice.

Is there an answer?

I don’t think the problem is that people no longer care. I think many of us have simply become overwhelmed.

Every day, we absorb news of wars, disasters, violence, political outrage, economic uncertainty, and human suffering from every corner of the globe. Ukraine. Israel. Iran. Natural disasters. Crime. Inflation. Mental health crises. We’re exposed to more pain before breakfast than previous generations encountered in months.

The human heart was designed to carry burdens, but perhaps not all the burdens of the world simultaneously. So we develop coping mechanisms.

We scroll. We distract ourselves. We become emotionally numb. We protect our hearts by refusing to feel too much.

The danger is that numbness doesn’t know how to discriminate. It doesn’t just block out distant suffering. Eventually, it blocks out the pain of the people sitting right beside us.

Someone tells us they’re struggling, and instead of listening, we offer advice. Someone shares their grief, and we rush to fix it. Someone admits they’re lonely, and we change the subject because their discomfort makes us uncomfortable.

We’ve become remarkably skilled at communicating and increasingly poor at connecting. Empathy requires something many of us are reluctant to give: time.

Empathy means slowing down long enough to notice another person’s wounds. It means listening without preparing a response. It means resisting the urge to compare pain.

Sometimes empathy means sitting in uncomfortable silence. It means acknowledging that not every problem can be solved and not every tear can be dried immediately.

Most of all, empathy requires presence. Not perfection, but presence.

I’ve learned that some of the people who helped me most during difficult seasons never offered profound wisdom. They simply showed up.

They sat beside me. They listened. They allowed me to tell the same story for the tenth time. They didn’t minimize my pain or rush me toward recovery.

They gave me the gift of being seen. Perhaps that’s what so many people are starving for today. People who will look at their pain and say, “I see it. I see you.” Because healing often begins there. It starts in a safe place with safe people.

And safety allows a person to actually see and name what needs healing. You can’t heal what you refuse to name.

Neither can a society.

Editor’s note – “Presence, not perfection” is a phrase worth keeping. It echoes the friends of Job, who did their finest ministry in the seven days they sat silently on the ground beside him, before they opened their mouths and made things worse. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can offer a hurting person is simply to stay.

Learning to acknowledge the wounds

If we’re becoming less empathetic, perhaps it is because we’ve forgotten how to acknowledge our own wounds. Unprocessed grief has a way of hardening the heart. The pain we refuse to face often becomes pain we can no longer recognize in others.

That’s why I find myself returning to a prayer written by Scottish minister John Baillie:

Let me use disappointment as material for patience;
Let me use success as material for thankfulness;
Let me use anxiety as material for perseverance;
Let me use danger as material for courage;
Let me use criticism as material for learning;
Let me use praise as material for humility;
Let me use pleasures as material for self-control;
Let me use pain as material for endurance.

What strikes me is that none of those experiences are wasted.

Not disappointment. Not anxiety. Not danger. Not pain. They become material, raw ingredients.

And these are the very things that can shape us into people capable of deeper compassion.

After all, I’ve found that the people who have comforted me best were usually not those who had studied suffering. They were those who had survived it.

The widow understands loss. The cancer survivor understands fear. The betrayed understand heartbreak. The lonely understand isolation. The wounded often become the most empathetic because their pain enlarged their capacity to see others.

Perhaps empathy isn’t disappearing. Perhaps it’s simply waiting to be awakened.

Every day we’re given opportunities. The exhausted cashier. The overwhelmed young mother. The grieving coworker. The elderly neighbor.

Or maybe it’s the friend who says, “I’m fine,” while their eyes tell a different story. The question is whether we will notice.

Empathy begins when we stop asking, “How is this affecting me?” and start asking, “What might this person be carrying?”

That mindset changes everything. It transforms strangers into neighbors. It turns arguments into conversations and isolation into connection. It revolutionizes grief into something shared rather than something suffered alone.

The truth is, everyone is carrying something. Everyone. Some burdens are visible. Many are not.

The person who seems successful may be battling depression. The person who appears strong may be exhausted. The person smiling across the table may be mourning a loss they haven’t spoken about yet.

We never know the full story. And that’s why kindness remains one of the wisest responses available to us.

Editor’s note – There is real Gospel here. The wounded become the most empathetic because Christ Himself was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3), and He turns our comfort into fuel for comforting others. Paul says God comforts us in all our tribulation, “that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble” (2 Corinthians 1:4).

So has society lost its ability to be empathetic? I don’t think so. I think we’ve become distracted. Overstimulated. Exhausted. Numb.

But numbness isn’t the same as cruelty. The capacity for empathy is still there.

It’s waiting. Like a muscle that hasn’t been exercised. Like a language we haven’t spoken in a while. Like a seed buried beneath hard soil.

The remedy may be simpler than we imagine. Slow down. Pay attention. Listen longer. Judge less. Show up.

Sit with the grieving. Call the lonely. Notice the overlooked.

And perhaps begin with yourself. Do you have tears that have never been shed? Losses that have never been mourned? Pain that has never been healed?

Allow yourself to grieve. Not as one who has no hope, but as one who understands that healing begins with honesty.

Grief reminds us that suffering is part of being human. And that none of us were meant to carry it alone.

Maybe empathy isn’t dying after all. Maybe it is simply waiting for us to look up from our screens, step into one another’s stories, and remember what we’ve known all along.

The world becomes a little less lonely every time one hurting person says to another, “I see you.”

A Word from the Editor
The author’s phrase, that we grieve “not as one who has no hope,” is drawn straight from Paul: “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). That is the difference the Gospel makes. We are not asked to be numb or to pretend the wounds away; we are invited to bring them, honestly and openly, to the One who sees us fully. Before we can say “I see you” to a hurting neighbor, we are met by a God who first saw us, entered our suffering, and bore it Himself. Empathy, at its deepest, is simply love learning the shape of another’s pain, the way He learned ours.