“You’re too kind, and it pisses me off” a friend said.

I stood there, leaning my back onto the hood of my Ute. My arms folded, I looked up and stared through the fence at the tarmac as these private planes landed. The evening breeze cruised calmly past the right side of my face, the darkness of the night lit up only by the runway lights, and the flickering red light of the airport watch tower.

“I just feel like one day it’ll pay off” I explained.

“It’s not going to pay off bro, you need to be more heartless. Some people don’t deserve it” He replied.

Growing up, I was quick to feel the pain of others deeply, sometimes too much. Maybe it is linked to my childhood or my upbringings. But I always was quick to overthink, quick to feel bad, quick to rush to meet everyone’s needs. As I got older, I got taken advantage of in many situations, and no matter how hard I tried to put on a stoic exterior, my interior was always sensitive and wanted to just empathise no matter the situation. While working as a street technician for NBN, even a man on a wheelchair coming up to me asking for directions was enough to make me tear up after he left. I knew the situation deserved me to feel bad for him, but at times I was overdoing it. It didn’t really promote my growth positively. Eventually I started tolerating disrespect by giving people excuses, or suppressing things I wanted to say in hopes of letting others vent freely and to avoid conflict.

There definitely is a dark side to empathy in my honest opinion. Many people may try to view the world through a pacifist lens, or even hold a world view that love fixes all. I disagree, I have been that type of individual, I have tried to fix people, I have tried to save people, but all you do is destroy yourself incrementally. But it doesn’t stop there, everyone is responsible for themselves. Your kids, your parents? Fair enough, you make sacrifices and put them before you. But everyone else, they’re on their own.

Every time you feel bad for someone you start to make them feel less than. Because reality for you isn’t the same reality as others. The human brain is extremely complex, your opinion and view on a situation could be worlds away from someone else’s outlook from the same community as you.
Frankly, for an individual human being in their own life, their situation is all they have ever known. Like two individuals observing artwork, I look at a piece, I feel angry. Someone else may observe the same piece and feel nostalgic.

You cannot over empathise with someone doing rehab if you have never abused drugs. You cannot over empathise with someone from a broken home if all you’ve ever known is a stable home. What happens is you end up projecting neediness onto them, when they’re most of the time living a
standard life in their view. You cannot reverse years of neglect and family dysfunction in months. It isn’t your job in the first place. It is like trying to explain colours to a blind person, he/she has never experienced sight, you simply cannot implant visual images into their brain suddenly.

Once you start putting yourself first, you flourish. Life is so dynamic; it isn’t black and white or linear. So long as you suffer from an internal conflict, or toxic social skills, you will attract the wrong people into your life. Picture this, if you say yes to everything all the time even when you’re tired, unable, or not in the mood, do you think you will attract selfless individuals? You are going to attract takers, selfish and greedy people. Sure, you may get lucky and run into someone healthy that’ll ground you, but it’s your job to fix yourself.

Dynamic doesn’t just mean constant change; it means contrast also. When I say life is dynamic, I am not saying you can table it or graph it, a better word is probably volatile. Adapting to the human experience that we are living through is the name of the game. One day its summer and you’re
sleeping early to wake up early and hit the beach and all these warm fuzzy feelings fill you up from head to toe. Fast forward 4 months suddenly you’re waking up early again, except this time you’re walking from central station to work. You clutch your puffer jacket, you walk under the rain jumping
under shelter where possible, as the wailing sirens of a morning highway patrol car ring in your ears.

Life is an open environment, suffering is inevitable, but pleasure exists too. You cannot escape the calamities of this world, we laugh, we cry, but in the end, we are human. I have began embracing the human experience for what it is. I will continue to be kind; it will just take me a bit longer to trust
people now. At 25, I learnt a lot very late in my life sadly, but in the end, I learnt. Some experiences, jobs, people, and environments in life enter your destiny and stay, others come through for a specific reason and leave as a lesson. And these lessons may not make sense at the time, but eventually everything falls into place.

You may be reading this and thinking, how depressing. I think it is liberating. The key is to be a vessel, stand firm on your values and let the rest pass with or through you. Enjoy the ride and learn to let go when the time is right. I have no regrets anymore, the past doesn’t weigh me down, there’s no time for that. I am not guaranteed the next 10 or 20 years, or even tomorrow, I will die eventually. You and I both owe it to our future self to live in the present, work hard, and lay the foundation for a successful future.

All the best, keep grinding

Houssam