A good indication of how people lack genuine empathy

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It seems all I hear, everywhere, is people complain about stuff that seems so meaningless. My cell phone bill went up, I can't find a date, my best friend won't talk to me anymore, etc. At work, people are always griping about the most petty things. The only difference between me and them, is my self-absorption does not involve another half.

If they really had this so-called "empathy," wouldn't they be noticeably disturbed by events in Japan, Libya, or Bahrain?

I have heard NO ONE express any sort of thankfulness for living here in America, and not having your entire family slaughtered or swept out to sea. No one even seems to care that much about what's going on in the world right now, and the only time it comes up is when I'm discussing politics. A variant of "My gosh, isn't it awful?" is all I hear from even the most intelligent and well-adjusted people I know.

Of course, bad things have always been happening everywhere, but now it's on the news all the time and people still don't seem genuinely disturbed by it. They just keep complaining about... well, nonsense.

It's like, really. Your life isn't that bad. Stop whining!

...Empathy is what's convenient.

Even if the technical definition is the ability to recognize emotions in others, the connotation is that you also CARE, and that interpretation what I'm commenting on.

(I'm not really that hostile, I just don't like being told I have no empathy when the rest of the world is clearly no better.)

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I very much agree. It seems to me like everyone thinks they are the center of the universe and don't care the least bit about anyone else.

This empathy thing is the main reason I argued that I wasn't in any way autistic. I feel like I have more than the average person, not less. I just may not show it externally. But much of the time the people showing it are faking it anyway.

I completely agree with you. It seems like everyone just cares about themsevles. We always discuss current events in my Government class at school and it surprises me some of the things people say.

I think that what defines being autistic is a lack of interest in other people, which comes across as being unempathethic. If you choose to expend more of your energy on your special interest, say, collecting rocks, than on building and maintaning relationships with others, congratulations, you're probably on the spectrum. But the chances are you genuinely care more about your pet rocks than most people care about their "friends" who come and go over the years.

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This is why I don't watch the news. Its just a massive depression program.

Haha you're probably right about that. Too bad not everyone thinks like that though.

At first I thought you were saying people were in the wrong complaining about their personal life but you were just using that as an example to make a point. Yeah we don't ever hear people whine about natural disasters or how they are being handled by the government. But you are most likely to see it online in threads on forums or in the comments to the news articles.

But yet people seem to be interested in themselves, autistic or not. I often wonder what is the difference between aspies lacking empathy and non aspies. I don't really see a difference. they both look the same. Could we lack more empathy than others? After all when we take that EQ test, we all can see no one scores an 80 which is the maximum. So that shows how everyone lacks it but yet we tend to score lower on the test than average. So do we lack more than they do? Is that the difference? Is that what they mean by we lack it?
I also feel mine is better than lot of peoples but I get told I lack it. At least my mother says I have it. My husband knowledges it too but he says I lack it.

Good point, guess I do have empathy because I find these things disturbing and US foreign policy morally repugnant. That's a really good point.

I think the world in general has become less empathatic. And aren't most of the questions more about understanding emotions. (Icould be wrong. I have taken too many tests to remember all of them). I just think empathy is too complex to be determined by a few questions.

I too hate hearing people whine about how bad they think there life is when stuff like this goes on in the world. Some people have real problems to deal with. (like people in japan right now and other people in 3rd world countries.) Whining about petty things is just pathetic.

I cannot stress enough how I agree with this.