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Does life hardens one from feeling empathy or does it increase empathy through experiences? This is assuming from age 18 versus older than age 18 (since empathy continues to grow through brain development until late teenage years, or perhaps even later), also eliminates the factor of abusive childhood)
I can't speak for everyone but it has done both for me, and it's situation-dependent.
I've developed more empathy for people who face certain battles, after having faced those battles myself. It's easier to put myself in their position and understand how it feels because I've been there. Yet I sometimes find myself indulging in the "when I was your age, we walked uphill in the snow" kind of thinking.
I can't speak for everyone but it has done both for me, and it's situation-dependent.
I've developed more empathy for people who face certain battles, after having faced those battles myself. It's easier to put myself in their position and understand how it feels because I've been there. Yet I sometimes find myself indulging in the "when I was your age, we walked uphill in the snow" kind of thinking.
I don't think age and experience have increased or decreased my empathy, but they have refined my empathy.
I think when I was young, I had this huge, amorphous, swelling, oozing blob of empathy. I would feel hurt, compassion, pity, or sorrow for others--people I knew, people on TV, animals, etc. It would just leak out all over. My eyes would well up watching a news story or hearing story second-hand of someone I've never met. I would have trouble sleeping, worrying about them, praying for them.
But somewhere in my young adulthood I started being more discriminating in my empathy, and I made my empathy membrane less porous. Is that person in that bad situation out of his/her own doing? Maybe they did something bad and they deserve the outcome. Do I really need to feel sorry for a person on death row who murdered 4 people? Maybe that person begging for money outside the 7-11 is putting all the money they get into their arm (as evidenced by those needle tracks). Maybe if I feel bad for that person begging, I'd do better by making a donation to a non-profit substance abuse treatment provider.
As I've become older, I've found my sense of empathy to be carved even more finely. Maybe that person who put himself into that horrible situation has really had a life-changing turning point and they deserve my empathy again. What are my personal standards for that that turning point before I'll allow myself to feel empathy for them? Maybe that person who always seems so good and selfless, and who has gotten hurt because of it, really needs to develop more appropriate boundaries and my empathy has not been helpful to her or to me.
I pretty much still have 100%-no-questions-asked empathy for animals. But people are much more complicated, so the empathy I allow myself has to be similarly complicated.
It depends on how you process your experiences. Bad things that happen can make us bitter, or help us understand life better. Really bad things that happen to us test us severely. But we are responsible for how we think about our experiences. We can wallow in bitterness, or we can process our disappointments in a more positive way.
I think life experiences for me have made me a very empathetic person and I always have been.
That being said, life has also taught me when to spot out those that are self centered and only wanting your empathy regarding things that really are out of line morally.
I'm going to go with "more empathetic"... because of life experience, I'm less likely to judge a book by its cover now. I can see how older people might come across as thick skinned in a way. I think that's mostly due to older people being less guileless, less easily led or fooled by a sob story, and less likely to give away blind trust in strangers...
I said less empathetic just because like the previous poster said you tend to realize that you might not be getting the full story.
I used to worry more about other people. Now I realize they are all their own world and I usually don't know them well enough. I help them as long as I don't have to do any sacrifice but I won't blindly trust anyone who is not a close relative.
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