Keep Your Pity To Yourself

It's always better to be hated than pitied. If there is one feeling I absolutely abhor, it is pity. Pity is the most useless of all emotions. It neither helps nor offers any real comfort to the person in grief. Nor does it even have the decency to emerge from empathy. Pity implies hierarchy. When you pity someone, you are indirectly asserting that they are beneath you — all your help then flows from benevolence, not empathy. It differs from empathy because there you are stepping inside the other person's shoes, trying to feel their pain. If not trading places, then at least reaching back into your own suffering to understand what it must feel like for them. When someone is grieving over a loss, you empathise by recalling how devastating it was when you lost a parent or a sibling. You understand that grief is a process, and that it looks different for every individual. Pity, however, implies that you are condescending toward someone while merely pretending to sympathise. You don't…