Most people believe they’re good at empathy. They listen, they nod, they say “I understand.” And in the moment, it feels genuine — both to the person offering it and the person receiving it. But what if the thing we reflexively call empathy is actually something else entirely? What if the easier, more comfortable version we default to doesn’t just fall short of real understanding — but actively blocks it?
“Empathy is really hard. It requires a lot of effort to see, hear, and understand someone for where they are.”
Scott Perry arrives at this conclusion not as a theoretical position but as a confession. He describes spending a year — a full year of daily walks with his wife — trying to figure out what empathy actually was. He’d ask people to define it, and their answers didn’t match his experience. He’d read about it, watch videos about it, and still something didn’t click. The uncomfortable realization: “You think you’re a good guy but your empathy quotient is very low.”
Get a free Field Guide + essays like this in your inbox every week —
https://openandcurious.org/subscribe/
That admission complicates the way most of us think about empathy in conversation. We treat it as a character trait — something you either have or you don’t, like a talent for music or a facility with numbers. The empathetic person listens well, picks up on emotional cues, makes others feel heard. It’s presented as a kind of warmth, almost passive in nature. You feel it or you don’t.
But what Perry describes is something closer to a discipline. Not warmth but work. Not intuition but practice — including a daily exercise of catching someone doing something good, naming what he saw, and thanking them for it, three times every day. That’s not the soft, instinctive process we associate with the word. It’s structured, deliberate, and uncomfortable.
Here’s where the complication deepens. In most conversations, what passes for empathy is actually projection. When someone tells you about a struggle and you respond with “I know exactly how you feel,” you’re not seeing them for where they are. You’re imagining yourself in their situation and reporting back what you find. The difference is enormous. One is an act of seeing. The other is an act of imagining — and the person doing the imagining rarely notices they’ve substituted themselves into someone else’s story.
This substitution feels good. It creates a sensation of connection, a warm recognition that you and this other person share something. But the connection is with your own experience reflected back, not with theirs. You’ve essentially turned a mirror toward yourself and called it a window into someone else.
The word “effort” is doing important work in Perry’s framing. It signals that genuine empathy in conversation doesn’t emerge from good intentions or emotional sensitivity alone. It requires you to suspend your own frame of reference — the very thing that makes you feel connected — and sit in the uncertainty of truly not knowing what someone else’s experience is like. That’s profoundly uncomfortable. It means tolerating silence instead of rushing to fill it with “I get it.” It means asking a question instead of offering a story of your own. It means staying curious longer than feels natural.
This has real implications for how we talk with each other. If most conversational empathy is actually projection, then many of our most “connecting” moments are actually moments of mutual misunderstanding — ones that happen to feel pleasant. The person sharing feels heard because someone responded emotionally. The person listening feels empathetic because they had an emotional response. Both walk away satisfied. Neither has actually crossed the gap between their experience and the other person’s.
The alternative Perry models is less satisfying in the moment. When you genuinely try to see someone for where they are — rather than mapping their experience onto your own — you often end up confused, uncertain, asking follow-up questions that reveal how little you actually understood. That doesn’t feel like connection. It feels like fumbling. But it’s in that fumbling that real understanding sometimes begins.
What makes this particularly worth sitting with is Perry’s observation that empathy without action — without that next step into compassion — becomes “an exhausting exercise.” The effort of genuinely understanding someone else’s position is draining when it stops at understanding. It only becomes sustainable, even energizing, when it leads somewhere: when seeing someone clearly translates into doing something useful with what you’ve learned. The effort finds its reward not in the feeling of having understood, but in the evidence of having helped.
Which may be the deepest complication of all. We think of empathy as the generous act — the thing good listeners do. But real empathy, the kind Perry spent a year learning to practice, isn’t where generosity lives. It’s the hard, uncomfortable groundwork that makes generosity possible. Discomfort, it turns out, is where empathy actually begins.
This field note references the Podtalk episode “Empathy with Scott Perry,” published October 28, 2021.
This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://openandcurious.org/2026/04/11/the-empathy-you-think-youre-offering/