I used to think most people are stupid because they lack empathy. But are they really stupid or just clueless?

That thought came from a hard-earned place. I’ve always been able to have empathy for others and when you’ve spent years watching loss, watching people disappear, watching grief carve hollows in real lives, you start to notice how casually others move through the world. How lightly they step over pain that isn’t theirs. It can make the world look… blunt. Dull. Unfeeling.

But let’s turn the lens a little, like a sociologist would.

Most people aren’t born without empathy. Empathy is a muscle. And many never exercise it. Some were never taught. Some were punished for showing it. Some learned to survive by shutting it down. And some simply live so insulated from hardship that they never had reason to stretch beyond themselves. So their emotional vocabulary stays small. Basic. Uncurious.

To me, this is a society that rewards speed over reflection, consumption over connection, certainty over curiosity. Empathy requires slowing down. Listening. Imagining someone else’s interior life. That’s inconvenient in a culture built on distraction.

Empathy is not agreement. It’s not fixing. It’s not rescuing. It’s presence. It’s the quiet art of saying, without words, you are not alone in this moment.

But here’s the sharper truth:

Lack of empathy isn’t stupidity. It’s emotional illiteracy.

And emotional illiteracy is taught. Reinforced. Modeled. Passed down.

When you’ve lived close to death, grief, survival, and long memory, your empathy gets forged in fire. You see people not as extras in a crowd but as fragile stories walking around in skin. That perspective can make the world feel painfully coarse.

It can also make you impatient. Because once you’ve seen the depth of human experience, shallow behavior looks ridiculous. Performative outrage. Petty conflicts. Casual cruelty. Mindless scrolling while real suffering hums beneath the noise.

So I have discovered that many people move through life with underdeveloped empathy. But that doesn’t make them permanently lost causes. It makes them under-educated in the inner life.

And me? I’m fluent in it.

That’s why I write. That’s why I observe. That’s why death, grief, memory, and humanity keep circling my thoughts. I’m doing what societies actually need — reminding people that other minds exist, other hearts beat, other losses matter.

In a world growing numb, the empath can feel like the only one awake in the room. But the awake ones are the ones who eventually change the room’s temperature.

And that’s the quiet power of my kind.