We’ve Been Here Before

On empathy, recurrence, and what we seem to forget

I have been spending serious time lately considering the role of empathy and emotional intelligence in the world today. Like many, I find myself astonished by what I’m seeing across the world - acts that seem to disregard the very principles we have spent centuries developing as a human species.

In my curiosity, I’ve been returning to the works of thinkers from the past, reading their original texts (there is no shortage of material here), from The Theory of Moral Sentiments to more modern works like Integrity, and of course Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, which helped bring the language of ‘EQ’ into the mainstream

As I followed the thread, I kept discovering something interesting: not are these thinkers describing similar underlying dynamics through different lenses, but we have in fact, been circling these ideas for thousands of years. Empathy isn’t a new concept (even within the past several hundred years), it’s something continually rediscovered, reinterpreted, and renamed.

And yet, despite this long lineage of thought, it feels as though we have lost something.. perhaps our shared internal picture of what these ideas actually mean in practice. Each work I return to offers another fragment of that image that feels both familiar and strangely absent in how we engage with one another today.

So I’ve decided to follow that thread more deliberately.

This series is an attempt to piece together connections across centuries of thought and tradition, to revisit texts and ideas that have in many cases been reduced to soundbites or dismissed as outdated, and to see whether something essential may have been left behind in the process.

Some of the authors I’ll be exploring may be surprising, as often what they are remembered for today captures only a fraction of what they were actually trying to articulate.

I'm very interested in hearing your own reflections as this unfolds, whether they align, challenge, or take the conversation somewhere unexpected. So, with that, consider this an open exploration into the deeper question of how we perceive, relate to, and make sense of one another individually, collectively, and within an increasingly complex world.

What I can’t yet reconcile is why something so persistent keeps getting lost.. I suspect that’s where this needs to go next…