If you’ve been working for a while, in a modestly less ideal environment that I’ve described in the previous post, I’m sure a lot of this regarding empathy and empathetic development seems pie-in-the-sky.
There are whole classes of businesses that exist where empathy hardly matters. The majority of academics, for example, aren’t even aware of the role of empathy — and are likely to criticize, or just flat-out ignore its importance.
Even the best of them — folks actually doing empathy research — don’t really have a good grasp on how connection evolves. I can remember reading eagerly through Franz de Waal’s book on The Age of Empathy, and nodding in agreement with his examples, looking for some sign that there was going to be something larger to tie it all together — because tying things together is not what academics normally do.
