"I get it"
"I understand."
"I can empathise"

But can you really?

Can you actually feel what someone else feels when their life, their history, their context, and their generational memory aren’t yours? Can you truly grasp a reality you’ve never had to survive, navigate, or explain?

I’ve had people tell me they understand what it’s like to be an immigrant because they’ve read a book, have a friend who is one, or conducted a 45-minute user interview. But reading about migration or hearing a story over coffee doesn’t prepare you for what it’s actually like to live between cultures. To be fluent and still sound “foreign.” To send out job applications with a name that gets quietly filtered out. To be asked where you’re really from, again and again, until your answer lines up with what someone has already decided.

It doesn’t show you what it’s like to have your parents sit you down and explain, gently but clearly, that people will be racist to you—and that your job is to stay calm, stay polite, and carry on. That there’s no point fighting every time. That speaking up will often cost you more than it changes. Not because they didn’t care—but because they knew the cost from experience.

I hated that conversation. I still do. Not because it was wrong, but because it was true. And one day, I will have to say some version of it to my own son.

That is not something you learn from listening to a story. That’s not something you access by “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.” Because even if you step into my shoes, it’s still you standing in them. Still your worldview, your logic, your sense of what makes sense.

Unless you carry all of that history too, what you know is not how I feel.

What you know is how you feel about my story.

That difference matters.

How empathy became a buzzword

Empathy didn't become a buzzword by accident. It became a buzzword because it offers something almost nothing else can: the feeling of moral involvement without the cost of living the reality.

Empathy offered a far more comfortable middle ground than admitting we might never fully understand. It allowed us to get close enough to someone else’s life to feel something—sadness, guilt, warmth, outrage—while still standing safely outside it.

It gave us a way to resolve the discomfort of distance without ever having to question whether the distance was something to be resolved.

But empathy offered more than access. It also offered reassurance. 

When someone says they listened, they're describing an action. When someone says they're empathetic, they're describing the kind of person they believe themselves to be. The word became associated with care, compassion, thoughtfulness, emotional intelligence, and good intentions all at once.

That bundle made it irresistible.

"I am an empathetic person" became the ultimate modern identity because it focuses entirely on the internal state of the feeler. It transforms someone else's structural struggle into proof of your emotional intelligence. When you say "I get you," you make yourself the compassionate protagonist of someone else's tragedy.

We didn't turn empathy into a buzzword because we wanted to understand each other better. We turned it into a buzzword because it allows us to feel close to the fire without ever getting burned.

The everyday version

"I know how you feel."

The sentence is meant to comfort. But what it often reveals is how quickly we collapse the distance between two lives.

Your experience gets translated into something I recognise in my own. Your grief becomes a version of my grief. Your fear becomes a version of my fear. Your story becomes something I can understand through myself.

That isn't understanding.

It's translation.

And translation is not a neutral act. Something is always lost in the process.

Empathy, as we often practise it, rests on a subtle assumption: that caring about another person requires converting their experience into terms we recognise ourselves.

But recognition and understanding are not the same thing.

AI exposes the tension

Perhaps that is also why AI unsettles us.

A machine can produce language about grief, survival, trauma, or love without ever having lived the reality those words point towards. It can recognise the symbols of human experience without ever carrying the weight behind them.

We call this the symbol grounding problem: the gap between a symbol and the reality it represents.

The uncomfortable question is whether humans are ever as far away from that gap as we like to believe.

When someone brings us their pain, we hear the words they use. We recognise the concepts. We can analyse them, respond to them, and place them into categories we already understand.

But knowing the symbol is not the same as knowing the reality behind it.

A word can carry an entire history that someone else has spent their life carrying. A single sentence can hold generations of experience, sacrifice, fear, and memory that we will never fully see.

Yet we often take those fragments, process them through our own worldview, and call it empathy.

We mistake familiarity with a concept for access to the life it represents.

AI makes that illusion visible because the gap is easier to see in a machine. We look at the algorithm and call it hollow because it has never lived.

But perhaps what should unsettle us more is how often we do a quieter version of the same thing to each other.

The dignity of distance 

Maybe the thing we have been trying to overcome is the very thing we should be protecting.

We have treated distance as a failure. A gap to close. A problem to solve through more listening, more research, more empathy. We assume that if we can get close enough, understand enough, and collect enough insight, another person’s reality will eventually become available to us.

But perhaps there is dignity in accepting that it will not.

Perhaps another person’s reality does not need to become accessible to us before we can respect it. There is a kind of arrogance in believing that care requires access. That someone else’s pain must become legible through our own worldview before we can acknowledge it.

Maybe the goal was never to eliminate the distance between us.

Maybe the goal was to learn how to honour it.

My friend Pia said something recently that stayed with me:

“Maybe empathy isn’t about understanding what someone else feels. Maybe it’s just about recognising that they feel differently.”

Maybe that's the only version of empathy worth keeping.

Not as a claim to understanding.

Not as proof of closeness.

But as an acknowledgement of distance.

Maybe the most honest thing we can say about another person's reality is not:

"I understand."

Maybe it is:

"I don't."‍

And maybe that’s where listening actually begins.