Listen. I have news for you, and you’re not going to like it.
Most of you—roughly nine out of ten, by my educated guess—have absolutely no idea what empathy actually means. You think you do. You’re quite certain you do. But you don’t. And so it goes.
What you’re doing when your neighbor gets cancer, when your colleague’s kid breaks an arm, when your sister loses her job—that’s sympathy. Which is fine. Sympathy has its place in the grand circus of human emotion. But it’s not empathy, and confusing the two is like confusing a postcard of the Grand Canyon with actually standing at its edge, vertigo and all.
Let me be plain: Empathy is to bend low. Sympathy is to look down.
One requires you to get dirty. The other lets you stay clean.
The Difference (Or: Why Your Condolences Card Isn’t Enough)
Let’s start with the words themselves, because language matters and etymology doesn’t lie.
Sympathy comes from the Greek sympatheia—syn (together, with) plus pathos (suffering, feeling). Literally: “suffering together” or “feeling with.” But here’s the thing the Greeks meant by “together”—it’s more like “in the same general vicinity” or “in solidarity with” rather than “completely immersed in.” You’re alongside the suffering, aware of it, moved by it perhaps, but fundamentally separate from it.
Empathy is the linguistic newcomer. It comes from the German Einfühlung—ein (into) plus fühlung (feeling). Literally: “feeling into.” When it was translated into English in 1909, they borrowed the Greek empatheia—en (in) plus pathos (feeling). You’re not standing with the feeling. You’re inside it. You’ve crossed the membrane. You’re in the thing itself.
The difference isn’t semantic quibbling. It’s the difference between observing someone drowning and being in the water with them.
Picture this: Your friend falls into a hole. A deep one.
Sympathy is standing at the edge of that hole, looking down, and saying, “Wow, that’s terrible! I’m so sorry you’re down there! Can I get you anything?” You mean well. You might even toss down a rope. But you remain topside, safe, observing their predicament from a comfortable distance. You feel for them. You’re moved by their plight. But you’re not in it.
Empathy is climbing down into the hole with them. It’s sitting in the muck and the dark and saying, “Yeah, this sucks. I’m here.” You don’t fix it. You don’t solve it. You share it. You feel with them—not as an observer, but as a participant in their reality.
Sympathy says, “I feel for you from where I stand.”
Empathy says, “I’m in this feeling with you now.”
The distinction matters because one is a spectator sport and the other is full-contact. Sympathy costs you nothing—you can maintain your emotional equilibrium, your sense of control, your clean clothes. Empathy costs you everything—your comfort, your emotional distance, your carefully maintained boundaries. Which is precisely why most people avoid it like a telemarketer at dinnertime.
A Brief (and Slightly Disappointing) History of Empathy
Here’s something that might surprise you: empathy is practically a baby in the timeline of human consciousness. The word itself didn’t exist in English until 1909, when it was translated from the German Einfühlung—literally “feeling into.” Before that? We didn’t even have language for this particular flavor of human connection.
The ancient Greeks had sympathy (sympatheia) down pat—literally “suffering together,” but with the emphasis on together meaning “in the same general vicinity,” not “in the same emotional trenches.” They were fine with pity, with compassion from on high. But the radical notion of actually entering someone else’s subjective experience? That took another couple thousand years to percolate through Western civilization.
It wasn’t until the late 19th and early 20th centuries—when psychology emerged as an actual discipline and people started getting curious about the mechanics of consciousness—that empathy became a thing we could name, study, and completely misunderstand.
Which brings us to now.
The Canadian Delusion (Or: We’re Not As Nice As We Think)
I’m Canadian. And we Canadians have built an entire national identity around being “the nicest people in the world.” We apologize when other people bump into us. We hold doors. We say “sorry” more than we say our own names. We’re so proud of our niceness that we’ve turned it into a brand, a stereotype, a tourism slogan.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: it’s a lie.
We’re not the nicest. We didn’t even make the top ten most empathetic countries in that Michigan State study. Ecuador beat us. Saudi Arabia beat us. The United States—the country we love to feel superior to—beat us at seventh place. We’re not particularly nice. We’re polite. There’s a catastrophic difference.
Politeness is sympathy’s cousin. It’s surface-level. It’s “sorry for your loss” and a casserole dropped at the door. It’s maintaining social lubrication without any actual emotional investment. And in many ways, Canadians have weaponized politeness to avoid the messy work of genuine connection.
We’re passive-aggressive masters. We won’t tell you we’re upset—we’ll just ice you out with a smile. We won’t confront conflict—we’ll talk about you to everyone except you. And empathy? Real empathy? That requires directness, vulnerability, and emotional honesty—all things we Canadians avoid like eye contact on the subway.
It gets worse in winter. When the clouds are dark and the days are short and the cold makes your face hurt, Canadian “niceness” evaporates like breath on frozen glass. We become isolated, withdrawn, barely able to muster sympathy, let alone empathy. We retreat into our survival modes and our heated homes and our carefully maintained emotional distance.
I know this because I just lived it.
When You Actually Need Empathy (A Personal Accounting)
My wife developed mastitis two weeks ago. If you don’t know what mastitis is, consider yourself fortunate. It’s a brutal infection that can happen during breastfeeding—painful, feverish, exhausting, and potentially dangerous. For my wife, it’s been devastating. For us as a family with a newborn, it’s been a special kind of hell.
We’ve made daily trips to the hospital. Sometimes multiple trips. The Canadian healthcare system is, to put it charitably, a mess. Wait times that would make Kafka weep. Overcrowded emergency rooms. A patchwork of overwhelmed professionals doing their best with inadequate resources.
But here’s what I learned: the system is broken, but some of the people in it are extraordinary.
There was one nurse. I won’t use her name because this isn’t about recognition—it’s about what she taught me about empathy without ever using the word.
When she walked into the room, something shifted. She didn’t just assess my wife’s symptoms—she saw her. She sat down. She made eye contact. She asked questions that went beyond clinical necessity. “How are you holding up?” “What’s this been like for you?” “I can see how exhausted you are.”
And then she said something that broke through everything: “I had mastitis with my first. And I’ve had cancer since then. I know what it’s like when your body betrays you. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re failing when you’re doing everything right.”
She climbed into the hole with us.
She didn’t offer platitudes. She didn’t minimize. She didn’t compare. She didn’t try to fix what couldn’t be immediately fixed. She just sat in the muck with us and said, “This is hard. You’re not alone.”
That’s empathy. Real, gritty, transformative empathy.
And here’s the devastating part: she could only do that because she’d been through it herself. Her empathy was born from her own suffering. She had the credentials—mastitis, cancer, the intimate knowledge of what it’s like when your body becomes your enemy.
Which raises the uncomfortable question: Can we only empathize with experiences we’ve had ourselves? Is empathy just sophisticated pattern-matching based on our own trauma?
I don’t know. But I know that nurse gave us something no one else in that hospital could. Not sympathy. Not politeness. Not even competence. She gave us the feeling of being understood, of being seen, of having our reality validated by someone who’d walked similar ground.
Brené Brown and the RSA Short That Changed Everything
I stumbled across Brené Brown’s work the way most people do—through that deceptively simple RSA animated short on empathy that’s been watched millions of times. You know the one. The bears. The hole. The whole thing.
When I finally read Dare to Lead, something clicked that hadn’t clicked before. Brown doesn’t just explain empathy—she dissects it like a coroner examining what went wrong. And what went wrong, friends, is that most of us have been performing sympathy our entire lives while congratulating ourselves on our empathy.
Brown breaks down empathy into four key attributes, and this is where it gets uncomfortable:
First: Perspective-taking. The ability to see the world as someone else sees it. Not imagine how you’d feel in their situation—that’s just narcissism with extra steps. But to actually understand their reality on their terms.
Second: Staying out of judgment. This is where 90% of us fail immediately. We can’t help ourselves. Someone shares their struggle and within microseconds we’re mentally cataloging all the choices they made that led them there. Empathy requires suspending that impulse entirely.
Third: Recognizing emotion in others. Sounds simple. Isn’t. Most people can identify the obvious stuff—tears mean sad, right? But the subtle frequencies? The shame masquerading as anger? The grief disguised as numbness? We’re illiterate.
Fourth: Communicating your understanding of that emotion. This is the “I’m in the hole with you” part. Not “I understand” (which is hollow) but “That sounds incredibly painful” or “I can see why you’d feel that way.” You’re reflecting back their reality without trying to polish it.
Reading Brown’s work renewed something I thought I understood but clearly didn’t. I realized I’d been standing at the edge of a lot of holes, occasionally tossing down advice like it was a life preserver, when what people actually needed was someone willing to sit in the dark with them.
The most devastating line in Dare to Lead is this: “Rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection.”
Read that again. Your solutions? Your silver linings? Your “everything happens for a reason”? They don’t help. They’re sympathy trying to cosplay as empathy. What helps is simply being with someone in their pain.
And here’s what I learned from Brown that nobody wants to hear: empathy is vulnerable. When you truly empathize, you risk feeling what they feel. You risk being changed by their experience. You risk your own discomfort. Sympathy protects you from all of that. It lets you care without cost.
No wonder we prefer it.
The Numbers Don’t Lie (But You Might)
In 2016, researchers at Michigan State University did something audacious: they measured empathy across 63 countries and over 104,000 adults. They looked at two components—empathic concern (do you care?) and perspective-taking (can you actually imagine being in someone else’s shoes, blisters and all?).
The results were illuminating and occasionally hilarious.
The most empathetic country in the world? Ecuador. Followed by Saudi Arabia and Peru. Denmark and the United Arab Emirates round out the top five. The United States scraped into seventh place—respectable, if unremarkable.
Canada? We didn’t make the cut. We’re somewhere in the middle of the pack, which is exactly where mediocrity lives.
The least empathetic? Lithuania took bottom honors, with Venezuela, Estonia, Poland, and Bulgaria keeping it company in the empathy basement. Seven of the ten least empathetic countries were in Eastern Europe, which raises fascinating questions about history, collectivism, and what happens when societies spend generations in survival mode.
But here’s what the numbers really tell us: empathy is not evenly distributed. Not across countries, not across communities, not even across your own friend group. Some people are naturals. Most people are amateurs. And a troubling number are actively terrible at it.
Where We Fail (Spoiler: Everywhere)
We like to think we’re empathetic when it’s convenient. When the person suffering is someone we like. When the problem is visible and dramatic. When there’s a clear villain and a sympathetic victim.
But empathy in the everyday trenches? With difficult people? With people whose problems we can’t understand or don’t want to? That’s where we collapse like a house of cards in a stiff breeze.
Consider: We’re decent at empathy with physical illness. Someone has cancer? We can rally around that. It’s concrete. It’s legitimate suffering. But depression? Anxiety? Addiction? Suddenly we’re back to sympathy at best, judgment at worst. “Have they tried yoga?” “Maybe they should just think more positively.” Congratulations, you’ve just failed the empathy test.
We’re empathetic with children—until they’re teenagers, at which point we decide they’re too difficult to understand and switch to lectures. We’re empathetic with the elderly—until they become inconvenient, and then we park them in facilities where other people can do the emotional labor of caring.
We’re empathetic with the poor—until we decide they should have made better choices. With the sick—until we grow tired of their not getting better. With the grieving—until we think they should be over it already.
Brown calls this out brilliantly in her work: we practice what she calls “comparative suffering.” Someone shares their pain and immediately we’re mentally calculating whether it’s bad enough to warrant empathy. “Well, at least you’re not…” “It could be worse…” “I know someone who…”
Stop it. Pain is pain. Suffering is not a competitive sport. The fact that someone else has it worse doesn’t make someone’s current struggle less real.
The Empathy Autopsy (Or: Examining Our Own Innards)
So here’s the uncomfortable question, the one I’m actually asking you to sit with:
Are you empathetic?
Not “Do you care about people?” That’s sympathy. Not “Are you nice?” That’s manners. Not “Would you help if someone asked?” That’s decency.
I’m asking: Do you regularly climb down into holes with people? Do you sit in their mess without trying to fix it? Can you hold space for someone else’s pain without making it about you, your discomfort, your need to solve it so you can feel better?
Can you feel with someone whose experience is completely foreign to you? Can you empathize with the person whose politics you despise, whose choices baffle you, whose life circumstances you can’t fathom?
Because that’s empathy. Real empathy. The kind that leaves you exhausted and raw and sometimes fundamentally changed.
Why This Matters (Beyond Making You Feel Bad)
We live in an age that desperately needs empathy and consistently settles for sympathy. We “send thoughts and prayers” instead of showing up. We click “like” on trauma posts instead of calling. We maintain our comfortable distance and call it boundaries, when really it’s just cowardice dressed up in self-care language.
But empathy—real, gritty, climb-into-the-hole empathy—is the only thing that actually connects us. It’s the difference between a society that functions and one that fractures. Between relationships that last and ones that crumble. Between humans who thrive together and humans who merely coexist, lonely and convinced everyone else has it figured out.
And here’s the kicker: empathy isn’t some mystical gift you either have or don’t. It’s a skill. A muscle. Something you can develop if you’re brave enough to do the work and honest enough to admit you probably need to.
That nurse didn’t have magic powers. She had lived experience and the courage to share it. She had the willingness to be vulnerable with strangers. She had practiced the art of sitting with suffering without trying to fix it.
We can all do that. Most of us just choose not to.
So What Now?
This isn’t an article designed to make you feel good. This is an intervention disguised as prose.
I want to know: What do you actually understand about empathy? Not what you think you should say, but what you truly believe. Are you operating in sympathy, calling it empathy, and wondering why your relationships feel shallow? Are you avoiding the hard work of truly connecting because it’s easier to care from a distance?
The Ecuadorians are beating us at this. The Americans are beating us at this. We Canadians—with all our polite hand-wringing and apologetic door-holding—aren’t even close.
So here’s your assignment, should you choose to accept it: The next time someone falls into a hole—metaphorical or otherwise—don’t stand at the edge with your rope and your platitudes. Climb down. Sit in the dark. Get uncomfortable. Feel with them, not for them.
And then tell me what you learned.
Because I have a feeling most of you are about to discover that empathy is harder, stranger, and more transformative than you ever imagined.
And so it goes.
The author would like to hear from you: What does empathy mean to you? Where do you fail at it? Where do you succeed? Let’s get honest about this thing we claim to value but rarely practice.
Josh Nash 
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