Why is empathy so hard to come by?

People sometimes read cheesy love stories and live in those worlds of romance for a couple of days. They would start thinking like the characters and will try to inject some romance from the book into their own lives. Be it a love-story or an epic of a freedom fighter or a biography of an inspirational person, the readers go to the extent of treating them as acquaintance.

You go to bed with the book in your hand or thinking of what happened in the Soap you watched after coming home. You keep wishing them a good ending because you feel for them even though you know they are not real.

So, for such a person, a joy or a grief of someone in his or her real world means a lot more than a story out of a book. And we try to reach out instead of discussing the  incidents and help out rather than sitting and watching what is going to happen next. Empathy is an emotion that is so rare and only comes in limited stocks.

Unfortunately, in a trend that seems like the world is spinning the other way, people have started treating anything that is out of their lives as a mere piece of news or good premise to scale their different opinions; be it your neighbour’s less peaceful family life or the new girl in the office breaking up with her boyfriend, you go to the extent of passing judgment on them when you really have no right to do so, never for a moment thinking that you could be In that situation one day.

Why would you read a book and cry, and when you hear the same incident happened for real, only take it for good gossip- material? Why was empathy that you felt for the non-existing character as real as the fakeness of your reaction when you heard that your not-so-close friend has got engaged? How easily people forget that as much as they value their lives and try to safeguard their privacy, others do the same, as their lives too are constructed from the same material perhaps of different proportions.

The Royal family and may be two-thirds of those Hollywood stars would never appear in tabloids if they have a choice. It is not funny when their relationships and failures are constantly discussed in the open as they are entitled to a certain degree of privacy too.

There may be ones with serious attention problems who love to be subject of scandalous gossip. But as for the rest, imagine someone discussing how everyone stared at your duck-walk while you are trying to rate low the new girlfriend of the tall, fair co-worker coz she is bit on the chubby side.