Original:
In both Bloom’s essay and DFW’s speech, I learned that empathy is a double-edged sword. On the inner blade, Bloom writes about how some people take empathy too far,
“We should empathize with the elderly who don’t get enough food, the victims of religious persecution, the poor without adequate health care, the rich who suffer from existential angst, the victims of sexual assault, those falsely accused of sexual assault . . . But we can’t.”
He discusses how many people try to empathize with anyone going through a hardship. This is damaging because there are too many people to look out for, and too many people who aren’t receiving help. If you try to help everyone, some people will receive just mediocre support because there simply is not enough time or resources to do so. A solution to this problem is to primarily look out for those closest to you, but do not try to make other people’s lives worse. In his commencement speech, DFW said,
“I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do”.
As for the outer edge of the sword, DFW discusses how empathy is a choice, and without it people are much angrier and short tempered. Empathy is being able to recognize the struggles of others and understand that you don’t have to change their life. If all people were able to realize the strength in understanding others over acting impulsively upon emotions, empathy would be beneficial in boosting morale, creating stronger communities, and developing emotional intelligence.
Revised:
In Bloom’s essay, I learned that empathy is a double-edged sword, meaning that it can be harmful and helpful. Bloom discusses how some people take empathy too far and can subsequently harm themselves and others in the process. He writes, “We should empathize with the elderly who don’t get enough food, the victims of religious persecution, the poor without adequate health care, the rich who suffer from existential angst, the victims of sexual assault, those falsely accused of sexual assault . . . But we can’t” (3). His approach to empathy is that it is helpful for the few that receive it, but he states how we truly cannot help everyone. The fact that there are so many people in need that we cannot help reminds me of the Dunbar Number from Konnikova’s essay “The Limits of Friendship” where she writes about how we can only care for a certain number of people before the number gets too big (2). If we start to say that everyone deserves empathy, we can’t truly care for all these people. In reality, everyone has major problems that they go through in life and some people go through them alone with no empathy from others. Sometimes people do need to fight through things alone and it is an important skill to build. That’s not to say that empathy is helpful, which it is, but some people feel too much empathy, and that is when people start shipping unnecessary children’s toys to Sandy Hook survivors that end up storing them in a storage locker (Bloom 2). Instead, if people could think logistically through situations and ask what others truly need instead of just feeling bad and acting upon first instinct, I think that people would function more efficiently as a society.
To solve the problem of inflated empathy, people should primarily look out for and feel empathy towards those closest to you, but simultaneously not trying to make other people’s lives worse. In his commencement speech, DFW said, “I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do” (5). DFW never says that we have to solve or even care about everyone in the supermarket’s problems, he says to acknowledge that anyone could be having a tough day and just try not to make it worse. He discusses how empathy is a choice, and without it people are much angrier and short tempered. Empathy is being able to recognize the struggles of others and understand that you don’t have to change their life. If all people were able to realize the strength in understanding others over acting impulsively upon emotions, empathy would be beneficial in boosting morale, creating stronger communities, and developing emotional intelligence.
Reflection:
I think this revision was necessary for the original paragraph, as it didn’t feel as strong as it could be. I decided to split it into two paragraphs, because as I was writing I had the great idea of incorporating Konnikova as my outside source. I split the paragraph because it would have been too long to keep it together, and now I can expand further on my DFW paragraph as I won’t feel limited for space. Instead of using two block quotes which are long, instead I used only one block quote and two instances of paraphrasing. I think this mix helped spice up the paragraph, as now there is variety in my source integration.
