Empathy for me is conditional

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To OP, I can see how having gone through a similar plight would make it easier, and feel more genuine about trying, to express empathy to another than if they were dealing with something completely foreign to you.

For me, there is something missing between the various thoughts of what I could say or do to help someone who is suffering, and the part of me that decides to act. It's like reaching for the next item in a sequence, and always coming up empty. I do well with compassion, but empathy throws me every time. It can make me feel monstrous, though I know it isn't true.


Joe

We really work much alike soul wise. But how do you explain I shed tears over my sister's dog's death? He lived long. My family showed great empathy for him. I felt his last heart-beats with my hand. That was upsetting.

Her being her mother chances are she will be sad at her death by both statistical probability(most people are disturbed when people die), and because I've thought about why death is sad. Common belief is "the suffering the person endured" makes it sad. That might be a small reason why people become sad at death, but it's not everything. A person you're used to interacting with and sharing things with being their for you is gone and will never interact with you again. It's a frightening reality, and also a reminder that that is in store for you and everyone you know and care about thanks to human mortality. This is why they invented religion. People needed a pleasant myth so they could believe they would reunite with the deceased. I can attribute my awareness of these things to thinking about religion, and about political science(at the bottom of it "fear of death" is the most commonly used motivation to get public support for a candidate or policy).

I've thought about what a society without "death" would be like and realized that if that one thing was gone we'd all be better off. Without death there can not be war, there will not be oppression of civil liberties when governments can't hull out the boogeyman of death. Since governments couldn't scare their citizens any more they would actually have to tend to their needs to keep their support, which would be a lot more simplified, all they'd have to do is oversee keeping the "anti-death system" afloat so nobody dies. That may be the one exception where governments might be able to scare people. Any organizations that are against the new technology would be very scary. But how scared people could get would depend on how easily compromised the "anti-death system" would be and how much the government and media are able to stretch the truth of how easily compromised it is.

No death means no hurry to "beat" people at skills and tasks, no hurry to do the things you want to do. You can just move at what ever pace you want and be assured of eventually doing everything you want. I can almost guarantee that if it wasn't for death looming over me(and I say this even as I am at a very young age) I would not have ever had any emotional problems. I could look at other people's lives and think "I'll get there eventually".

This is theoretically possible with nanotechnology if you could program the nanobots to oversee the body's functions and replace defective or absent cells and tissue. I hope it comes in my life time.

off
DGuru,
I suggest you read Stanislaw Lem, begining with Cyberiad, if you are interesed in socio-philosophical sci-fi.
Look for "Stories involving the search for happiness and ideal society" here on Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad
How could an inmortal society be motivated in any way?
on

That's exactly how I feel. You are not alone.

Because it's unnatural to want to do absolutely nothing.

An immortal society would be everyone acting without purpose, but since we'd be immortal that wouldn't cause any problems. It would be freedom, just doing what you want to do and answering to nobody.