The Soul-Sucking Curse of Too Much Empathy

There’s a lot of hand-wringing these days about how we don’t have enough empathy. The 70-day administration of the Great Fraud spins things to indicate that Americans have too much empathy and the Left responds with a hard turn to the other side. As if the grand disease of the 21st century is a shortage of feelings for other people. That if we could just feel more, we’d solve war, depression, racism, income inequality, and that existential weight you carry every time you stare into your phone like it might finally love you back.

I call bullshit.

In a recent exchange, just after she placed a sticker on a wall next to us that said “Free Palestine,” a friend decided that, for reasons that were apparent to her at least, it was time for someone to school me on the tragedy it is to be an undocumented immigrant. I listened. I didn’t react or respond. I nodded. She held court. Finally, when it was the moment for me to wholeheartedly acquiesce to her moral high ground, I said, “Sounds good. Not really my issue but I’m happy you have one.”

She nearly lost her mind.

I’m reminded of Neal Brennan’s Netflix special where he shared his most controversial opinion concerning the transgender community. “I don’t really think about them that much. Neal, are you a bigot? Nope. Just busy. I think about transgender people about as much I think about left-handed Filipino people. I’m not mad at them, I hope they get everything they need, if I meet one and they want to shake with their left hand, I’m not like right hands only.”

Empathy, in its original form, is evolutionary. Tribal. Your brain lights up when your kid scrapes his knee, when your friend gets dumped, when your buddy loses his job. Empathy is a survival mechanism for small groups. It’s designed to keep the herd from wandering off the cliff. It’s meant to foster cohesion, cooperation, and communal memory.

Too much empathy is not a virtue. It’s a slow, leeching death of the self. It’s worse than having none, because at least the sociopath sleeps at night. The over-empathizer lies awake, soaking in the imagined pain of everyone from their barista to the children of Gaza to the squirrel they almost hit with their Prius. It’s a noble poison, poured by the ladle-full from the chalice of good intentions, and it will hollow you out until you are nothing but nerves and noise.

You want a gritty metaphor? Here’s one: trying to empathize with everyone is like trying to suck the poison out of a thousand snake bites at once. You can’t do it. You’ll die. And the snakes will keep biting.

Too much empathy is emotional bulimia. You consume every horror, every heartbreak, every story, and then regurgitate it in the form of outrage, sadness, or performative advocacy, hoping the purge will make you clean. It doesn’t. It just leaves you raw.

And worse? You’re useless. You can’t help anyone when you’re curled into a ball, weeping over the suffering of someone you’ll never meet in a country you couldn’t find on a map if the fate of humanity depended on it.

Empathy starts small. Harmless. A mogwai of the heart. You see someone in pain—you feel for them. That’s normal. That’s good. That’s being human.

But then you feed it. You feed it after midnight. You let it grow claws. You scroll through every tragedy on Twitter X. You read the comments. You watch videos of dogs being rescued, babies crying, mothers wailing, and you don’t stop.

Soon, the mogwai is gone. You’ve got a house full of Gremlins tearing up your insides. You can’t sleep. You can’t focus. Your feelings, meant to connect you, now paralyze you. You’re not helping anyone—you’re just bleeding empathy in every direction like a sprinkler system built in hell.

And here’s the real deal: no one wants your Gremlins. They’re not comforting. They’re not noble. They’re just messy and loud. You’re making the suffering about you. Your tears, your panic, your need to feel all the things—it becomes a black hole of usefulness.

Empathy is supposed to bridge the gap between people. But when you overdo it, it builds a wall made of anxiety, fear, and compulsive guilt. You stop showing up, because the world is too heavy and you’re too fragile. That’s not empathy. That’s narcissism in sheep’s clothing.

When you feel for everyone, all the time, without discrimination, your inner wiring fries. You become emotionally radioactive. You burn out. You start to dissociate. You numb out just to survive your own internal chaos.

And here’s the hard truth: people stop trusting you.

Because you can’t be counted on. You’re not steady. You’re too busy combusting over things you can’t fix, too tangled in other people’s pain to offer clarity or support.

Empathy becomes noise. Static. A storm of emotional data without an outlet. People who used to look to you for comfort now avoid you because you’re a siren, not a lighthouse.

Here’s what over-empathizers do: they try to fix the past. You hear someone’s trauma, and you climb into your emotional DeLorean, trying to drive 88 miles per hour back into their history, hoping to undo what hurt them. You want to rewrite their narrative. You want to save them.

But you can’t.

You don’t have plutonium. You don’t have a flux capacitor. And no matter how fast you drive, you’re not Marty McFly—you’re a bystander who thinks feeling deeply is the same as helping.

It’s not.

Empathy doesn’t heal wounds. Presence does. Support does. Actions do. Sitting in someone’s pain with them is noble. Sinking in it like quicksand is not.

Worse? You waste all your fuel on time-traveling guilt and emotional fantasy. Meanwhile, the present suffers. The people who need you now don’t get you, because you’re too busy spiraling in someone else’s yesterday.

Empathy is a tool. Like a hammer, or a pair of pliers. You don’t walk around trying to hammer everything you see into a shape that matches your sadness.

Used properly, empathy allows you to see someone else clearly—to understand, to relate, and to respond appropriately. But unchecked empathy becomes emotional bleed-through. You stop knowing where you end and someone else begins. You confuse mirroring pain with processing it. You get addicted to the sensation of sadness, and mistake that addiction for moral clarity.

I’ve met people so drenched in empathy they can’t have a normal conversation. Everything becomes about suffering. Every interaction is a trap door into someone else’s wound. You tell them you had a rough day at work, and suddenly you’re getting a full-body TED Talk on corporate trauma, economic injustice, and the systemic erasure of meaning in late-stage capitalism.

That’s not empathy. That’s emotional hoarding.

And like all hoarders, over-empathizers think they’re saving things. They think their feelings matter more because they feel so damn much. But all they’ve done is pile up a mountain of other people’s pain until they can’t move, can’t breathe, and can’t see out the window.

You know what would help more? Less feeling, more doing.

Don’t just cry with someone—bring them food. Don’t spiral in the horror of the news—donate, volunteer, act. Don’t assume that understanding someone’s pain makes you part of their healing. You’re not. You’re a guest in someone else’s story. Act accordingly.

And if you can’t act? If you’re too overwhelmed? Then opt out. Take a break. Feel less. Feel selectively. Curate your empathy like a goddamn adult. Because if you burn out, you become just another screaming void in a world already full of them.

There is nothing noble about being broken by empathy.

Here’s the bottom line:

Too much empathy is emotional masturbation. It feels good to care. It makes you feel important. But it doesn’t change anything. It’s self-soothing disguised as virtue. And it turns you into someone who talks about saving the world while doing exactly jack shit.

You want to be useful?

Don’t feel more. Feel smarter.

Feel with focus.

Feel with boundaries.

Feel like a surgeon, not a sponge.

Stop acting like the most emotional person in the room is the most virtuous. Often, they’re just the most lost.

If we want to survive—hell, if we want to help—we have to stop canonizing the feelers and start empowering the doers. The ones who feel just enough to connect, but not so much they can’t move.

Don’t feed your empathy after midnight. Don’t time-travel into pain you can’t fix.

Instead?

Be present.

Be kind.

Be useful.

Feel what you need to feel, then get to work.