“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
— Sally Rooney
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Are we connecting with others, or just performing empathy? Sally Rooney reminds us: “It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.” Let's trade intellectual superiority for radical, genuine empathy. How do you keep your connections authentic in a world of performance?
About this quote
In a world where we often curate our lives for an audience, it is easy to mistake the performance of empathy for the act of actually feeling. We sometimes use our knowledge, our tastes, and our achievements as armor to distance ourselves from others, turning our understanding of human suffering into a badge of intellectual superiority. But true growth doesn't happen in the safe distance of a 'false journey'; it happens when we tear down the pedestals we've built and realize that every single person, regardless of their status or education, carries a universe of pain and beauty within them. Life's most profound lessons aren't found in the pursuit of status, but in the courage to be vulnerable. When we stop using culture as a tool for performance and start using it as a bridge for genuine connection, we move from observing life to actually living it. Let us strive for a heart that doesn't seek to feel superior, but seeks to feel alongside. By embracing our shared fragility, we find the only kind of maturity that truly matters: the ability to see ourselves in the 'other' and love them not for their story, but for their shared humanity.
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Photo by Juri Schick on Pexels
