Retirement gave me the mental and emotional space…

Transcript

I just entered year four of my retirement, and there's a big change that's happened in the last year. I've gotten better at empathizing without having experienced someone else's struggle. One of the problems that people like me have, and I think there's a lot of people in my situation, I don't naturally empathize with people. I wish I did, but I don't. The first and most prominent way that I experience empathy is for me to have gone through what they're going through. For example, if someone tells me that our healthcare system is broken, I might say, look, there's a lot of things that are broken. I can't get dragged into every little problem that everybody has. And then I have to access the healthcare system, and I experience what's wrong with it. All of a sudden, I'm like, yeah! Yeah, we need to do something about the healthcare system. Because I couldn't feel what they were feeling until it literally happened to me. And then I developed this way of sort of like trying to find linkages. And this was from being retired. As a retired person, I have the mental and emotional time and energy to sort of try and build a bridge between what somebody else is experiencing and something that I experienced. So, someone might say, well, this group of people are being treated unfairly. And, you know, I look at that and I'm like, well, I don't understand that, and it doesn't affect me. So, somebody else can deal with that. And then I think, well, hold on a second. What must it be like for those people? And I'll say, okay, well, what's the closest thing I can think of that's happened to me? And I can usually think of it as, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And I'll say, well, how did that affect me? And, like, you know, how did I view the way others perceived what was happening to me? And I basically have to sort of, like, build this ladder up to where I can connect with someone else's struggle. But I never did that before I retired. So, one of the things retirement has done for me is it's allowed me the mental and emotional space to build that bridge between the struggles of other people. And experiences that I've had so that I can at least, you know, for me, as close as I'll ever get to empathize with other people. And honestly, I think it works to the advantage of those who would oppress other people for people to be as busy as they are. Because if everybody's busy and just trying to make ends meet, they're not able to spend the mental and emotional time making these bridges between their experiences and the experiences of other, often smaller groups, who really do need a leg up from time to time. So, thank you, retirement, for helping me get better at empathizing.