Locked into Experience
People often talk about empathy as if it means we can step into someone else’s shoes and truly feel what they feel. But if you think carefully, there’s a limit. No matter how much you imagine, you can’t actually be someone else. Their experience is theirs alone.
Philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn once made a similar point about scientific communities. He argued that different “paradigms” — different ways of doing science — are so tied to their own assumptions and language that they can’t be fully translated into each other. What makes sense in one world doesn’t neatly map onto another.
Now extend that idea to groups in society. People end up clustering with others who share their experience, because only there do they feel understood. From the inside, these groups feel like a home. From the outside, they often look like echo chambers, toxic bubbles, or places of bitterness. Think of how incel communities are usually portrayed: dangerous, angry, radicalized. Yet for someone inside, it’s one of the few spaces where they don’t have to explain themselves — because everyone already “knows.”
Part of the problem is language. Even when groups try to explain themselves, the words often fall flat. Language is shaped by context, and if you haven’t lived the context, the words won’t carry the same weight. A man saying he feels “invisible” to women means something very different to someone who’s lived that reality, compared to someone outside it who just hears the word at face value.
It shows up in advice too. People share what worked for them, or what seems to work for their “caste” in the social hierarchy. But to someone outside that strata, the advice sounds like gibberish. A woman might tell a man to “just be confident,” because from her vantage point, confidence was what mattered in choosing men. But to him, living in a different tier of the hierarchy, confidence without looks or status is useless. Each group’s strategies are logical within their world, but meaningless in another.
Then there’s power and framing. Groups with more cultural power get to decide how others are seen. So incels aren’t just described neutrally — they’re framed as pathetic, toxic, even dangerous. Similarly, when men complain about a gynocentric society, it’s often dismissed outright, because the dominant cultural narrative favors women’s perspectives. The lock isn’t just experiential; it’s political.
The same applies when men look at women and see privilege, or when women look back and insist they don’t feel privileged at all — they just are. Each side is living in a different world of experience. The lives of women look effortless to men, but from the women’s perspective, society is simply arranged around them in ways they don’t even notice. To men, that feels like gynocentrism. To women, it just feels like life.
And so the gap persists. Empathy, as we usually talk about it, may be more projection than reality. What people really do is approximate — they imagine what they themselves would feel in another’s shoes. But they can’t ever be that other person.
We are, in a sense, locked into our groups, our experiences, our paradigms. That lock isn’t necessarily a prison — it can give belonging and identity. But it also makes it nearly impossible for others to truly fathom what life looks like from where you stand.
The truth is cold: they will never understand you, and you will never understand them. Empathy, at best, is theater — people projecting their own feelings into your story and pretending it’s the same. It isn’t. You’re alone with your experience, just like they’re alone with theirs. The sooner you stop expecting to be understood, the clearer things become.
People often talk about empathy as if it means we can step into someone else’s shoes and truly feel what they feel. But if you think carefully, there’s a limit. No matter how much you imagine, you can’t actually be someone else. Their experience is theirs alone.
Philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn once made a similar point about scientific communities. He argued that different “paradigms” — different ways of doing science — are so tied to their own assumptions and language that they can’t be fully translated into each other. What makes sense in one world doesn’t neatly map onto another.
Now extend that idea to groups in society. People end up clustering with others who share their experience, because only there do they feel understood. From the inside, these groups feel like a home. From the outside, they often look like echo chambers, toxic bubbles, or places of bitterness. Think of how incel communities are usually portrayed: dangerous, angry, radicalized. Yet for someone inside, it’s one of the few spaces where they don’t have to explain themselves — because everyone already “knows.”
Part of the problem is language. Even when groups try to explain themselves, the words often fall flat. Language is shaped by context, and if you haven’t lived the context, the words won’t carry the same weight. A man saying he feels “invisible” to women means something very different to someone who’s lived that reality, compared to someone outside it who just hears the word at face value.
It shows up in advice too. People share what worked for them, or what seems to work for their “caste” in the social hierarchy. But to someone outside that strata, the advice sounds like gibberish. A woman might tell a man to “just be confident,” because from her vantage point, confidence was what mattered in choosing men. But to him, living in a different tier of the hierarchy, confidence without looks or status is useless. Each group’s strategies are logical within their world, but meaningless in another.
Then there’s power and framing. Groups with more cultural power get to decide how others are seen. So incels aren’t just described neutrally — they’re framed as pathetic, toxic, even dangerous. Similarly, when men complain about a gynocentric society, it’s often dismissed outright, because the dominant cultural narrative favors women’s perspectives. The lock isn’t just experiential; it’s political.
The same applies when men look at women and see privilege, or when women look back and insist they don’t feel privileged at all — they just are. Each side is living in a different world of experience. The lives of women look effortless to men, but from the women’s perspective, society is simply arranged around them in ways they don’t even notice. To men, that feels like gynocentrism. To women, it just feels like life.
And so the gap persists. Empathy, as we usually talk about it, may be more projection than reality. What people really do is approximate — they imagine what they themselves would feel in another’s shoes. But they can’t ever be that other person.
We are, in a sense, locked into our groups, our experiences, our paradigms. That lock isn’t necessarily a prison — it can give belonging and identity. But it also makes it nearly impossible for others to truly fathom what life looks like from where you stand.
The truth is cold: they will never understand you, and you will never understand them. Empathy, at best, is theater — people projecting their own feelings into your story and pretending it’s the same. It isn’t. You’re alone with your experience, just like they’re alone with theirs. The sooner you stop expecting to be understood, the clearer things become.
