Seen a few pieces about how we should be prioritising compassion over empathy to save ourselves from exhaustion. Only place I remember reading off top of my head was Rutger Bregman's Humankind. Interesting to ponder

This is a very good point and I'm going to check out the book you mentioned. Thank you

It's super uplifting, which is not something we get from a lot of non fiction, of course. Hope you enjoy!

Can you give an example of toxic empathy?

I don't know what the official definition is, but I'd consider deliberate mirroring of posture, online tone, and emotional state for conscious deceptive, and manipulative ends to be toxic empathy.

Trivial example - phone services with the stock "Your call is important to us but we're experiencing an unusually high level of calls right now" message. When the truth is the company is spending a bare minimum on phone support and knows it.

Or customer service scripts that say something like "I understand you're frustrated that you're having this problem."

In reality there's no understanding. And there may not even be any interest in fixing the problem - because when you read back through other messages you see the problem has been there for years and there's been absolutely no effort to find a fix.

That sounds like most CEOs jumping on an HN thread when there is an article denouncing there company.

They follow the same pattern. Start with "Hey! SomeStartup CEO here."

Then proceed to explain that they are happy about the feedbacks and that they hear the complains. Followed by more words that could have been written by GPT-3.

Apparently the official definition is when someone over-identifies with the emotions of someone else (the over identifier is experiencing toxic empathy).

I resent the scripted CS, so I'm not arguing about that part of it, but I think those are actually the opposite of empathy, sociopathically inserted in order to manipulate, emotionally aware but indifferent.

Perhaps taking someone's problems as your own instead of letting them resolve the situation.

I feel its whatever the opposite of just saying "damn that's crazy" when people complain at you.

No, it’s when they have problems but you have all the anxiety as if they were your problems.

This anxiety has jack to do with you actually helping them, it’s just that you get so anxious about their problems that it impedes working on your own problems.

People who are complaining often aren't soliciting advice and don't welcome it if offered. I think the "damn that's crazy" responses generally come from people who are aware that offered help won't be warmly received and don't have the emotional energy to put on a more convincing display of empathy, but still pay lip service to the premise for the sake of civility.

But the exact opposite would be "What does that have to do with me?"

Interesting, I don’t see that happening in social media on a scale big enough to warrant as much criticism as toxic positivity. In fact, I don’t see that at all, though of course it could just be the curation algorithms—or is that being applied to activism too?