If you are feeling a bit too much empathy, and it has you on the floor feeling terrible, don’t go to war with it, up-level it into compassion. It helps.
I’m speaking from the experience of someone who has spent years feeling other people’s suffering, sometimes even experiencing cultural pain in my soul and body. If you want to know what makes you want to die, it is feeling the collective stress of individuals and groups and not knowing the cause.
Over-active empathy usually happens to highly sensitive, creative, and brilliant folks. And it can hurt. Bad.
This blasted openness to other’s emotional states often happens to people who need rest or are feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes it happens to people not treating their personal little egoic selves1 as important or separate from family or business interests.
And when overworking, “burnout” can lead to this experience for sure.
So, when I read that Elon Musk was going to war with empathy2 3, I thought he must be personally suffering in some way, and trying to kill off an aspect of his nature to try to relieve the pain that was likely flooding his being. There is no other reason to go to war with an idea, right? Especially an idea that has moved civilization forward in incredible ways…
So like everyone else, he can only choose to do good with it. And we actually need smart, sensitive people to choose compassion and do something with it. Me, I’m writing this to you, YOU who understands what I’m talking about. Yes, you are not alone, and yes, there are brighter days ahead.
Declaring a war on empathy is not good for anyone. And in Mr. Musk’s case eXtra not helpful, because he holds power over others’ jobs, personal data, financial safety, health care, and civil freedoms. He’s been saddled with this mantle, given him by Trump to create efficiencies and systems, and the only way he knows how to do this it seems, is to CUT and delete stuff.
Ooops. 💩 That’s a DOGEy doo.
Could it be he hasn’t yet realized the way to end the personal suffering of over-active empathy, is to engage compassion?
Distinction: Compassion is Creative
Empathy is FEELING other people’s negative emotions and experiences, and suffering along with them.
Compassion is ACTION to alleviate other people’s negative emotions and experience, and thereby relieving suffering for self and others.
The larger your impact on people’s emotional states, the more empathy you may be subject to feel. The fact that you feel emotions you cannot fully understand, is to your credit. What you choose do with your spidey-sense, is up to you.
It seems to me Mr. Musk may have invented, or over-worked his way out of feeling emotional pain in the past. His overzealous work ethic, high attunement to trends and opportunities made him very busy and the richest man in the world. But things turned for him some time ago, perhaps around the time he was forced to acquire Twitter. At least that’s when it became publicly noticeable that he was stuck in a bad pattern.
This negative turn was evident to me – in the way he publicly destroys things (we see what he did to Twitter), the way he hyper fixates on “X” (a familiar symbol on the web that means “delete”), and the way he worships “cutting” as “efficiency” in a destructive method of improving things.
He lives a great deal on the web, and it seems, and the rest of his time in space, mentally and metaphorically.
What he doesn’t seem to do, is live on the Earth with the rest of US. And many of us, especially our poor, elderly, people of color, women and LGBTQ folks are feeling frightened. The amount of fear knowingly kicked off by a man who knows about the effects of trauma is staggering.
Musk seems to be begging, moving mountains even, for a change to his own emotional state (including taking boatloads of ketamine4 to please his shareholders5), and yet, is so enmeshed in so many big efforts and his identity as world’s richest man, he probably feels can’t take a break.
He is acting like mania embodied. Make More, More, More. Then Delete More, More, More.
To add insult to injury, he got himself in bed with an unkind, shadowy capitalist showman who seems devoid of caring for the masses. So this is a conundrum. Better for him to stay, or to go? I bet he’s contemplated this, and soon, he’ll be called to go anyway.
But this agonizing empathy won’t necessarily go away just because the job does. It’s a part of him.
And isn’t what most good folks think: I’ll join in the efforts (of the powerful) and make a positive difference? But getting in with folks like this, and carrying mantled power to boot, just means you become a part of THAT system, and you can only get free if you see the situation for what it is.
So Mr. Musk (and anyone else who gets what I’m saying), if you feel the pain of too much unclear empathy, it’s because you are whole and human, and you have a gift.
Now go do something good with it.
FOOTNOTES
- Folks who focus on “helping humanity” via politics, space travel, philosophy, art or idealism can sometimes forget the importance of their little personal, embodied selves. You know, the self that feeds the kids, walks the dog, and is loved by your family and friends. That one matters too. You are ground zero humanity: your sweet, little lovely self. ↩︎
- https://www.salon.com/2025/04/11/magas-on-empathy-exposes-misogynist-fears/ ↩︎
- https://www.salon.com/2025/03/20/they-basically-wanna-me-efforts-to-turn-musk-into-a-maga-martyr-are-backfiring/ ↩︎
- https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/ketamine-effects-elon-musk/681911/ ↩︎
- https://youtu.be/dmqx_ohSUYk?si=rH_qZYDXAPWV_H-t ↩︎
