Pulitzer-winning journalist Katherine Anne Porter once wrote: There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.
The universe does not argue with itself. It simply is. Human life, on the other hand, resists such order. The universe is ordered. Human life is not. And I contend the disorder is of our own making. It is the natural consequence of a species that has decided its own feelings are the most important data in the room.
We assert, we interpret, we misinterpret. We cling to our rights, our feelings, our versions of events. We move through the world convinced not only of our own correctness, but of our ability to inhabit the lives of others. To judge them, to correct them, to improve upon their decisions as though we had been there ourselves. As though we would have done better.
But this confidence is not empathy. It is closer to intrusion.
This is not meant as an insult. I mean it as an honest reading of the evidence of life. We are wired for self-preservation. We are built to see the world first through the lens of I. And that would be fine, maybe even beautiful in its own strange way, if we were islands. If our lives didn’t touch each other, or bleed into each other the way they do.
If there is a fault at the centre of human chaos, it may be that we are, at our core, selfish. We are not always cruel, not always intentionally harmful, but persistently centred on self. Even our attempts at understanding others are often refracted through our own experiences, our own logic, our own emotional vocabulary. What we call empathy, most of the time, is us slipping on our own shoes, the ones worn soft in all our specific shapes, our specific histories, our specific fears, and then walking over someone else’s situation in them. We do not step into another person’s life, we drag them into ours. We arrive at our conclusions. We offer our opinions. We say I understand, when what we mean is I have decided what I would do in your shoes.
True empathy, if it exists at all, demands something more difficult. True empathy asks us to approach another life with the humility of not knowing. It asks us to recognise that another person’s decisions were made within a structure of experiences we do not share, with information we may never have had, under pressures we cannot fully reconstruct. It asks us not to replace their perspective with ours, but to sit beside it, however incomplete our understanding may be. True empathy requires us to stand in another person’s specific ground, with their specific weight, the specific stones beneath their feet. It would require you to forget, for a moment, that you know things they don’t. That you have access to outcomes they couldn’t have seen. It would require the radical humility of I don’t know what it is to be you.
And we are very bad at that. We are very bad at not knowing things.
This kind of empathy feels almost unreachable. What we practice instead is approximation. We put on our own shoes and walk across someone else’s terrain, believing the act itself is enough. But the ground is different. The weight is different. The consequences are not ours to carry. And so we misunderstand, because we do not know how to care without centring ourselves.
Perhaps this is where the chaos of humanity begins.
We forget that other lives are unfolding alongside our own, and these lives are equally complex and equally justified in their internal logic. We forget that the world is not populated by extensions of ourselves, but by entirely separate centres of experience. And in that forgetting, we create friction that starts out small at first, then becomes overwhelming.
Chaos
Still, there is something that resists this collapse into disorder. We are not meant to exist alone. The idea that no man is an island persists because it reflects something structural about human life. We are, despite our selfishness, dependent on one another. The beauty of being human, and there is beauty, even in all the mess, is that we are all irreducibly different. Our DNA. Our fingerprints. The specific configuration of every loss we have ever carried. Nobody is a copy. Nobody is a repeat. And that difference, if we let it, is the very thing that makes community work. You carry what I cannot. I carry what breaks you. The yin and the yang of it. Strength leaning into weakness. Weakness leaning into strength. We fill the gaps in each other. One person’s clarity fills the gap of another’s confusion. We compensate for each other. That is the order hidden inside the chaos. We are a collective completion, not individual perfection.
Community is a condition of survival. It is also, perhaps, the closest thing we have to order.
But something has gone wrong. Something has been pulling us away from each other for a very long time. Modern life has complicated the simplicity of community. We have started to live like all men are islands. We have fortified our boundary walls. We are guarding our coastlines. We are stopping the tide from coming in. Systems like capitalism that reward individual gain over collective stability have a way of amplifying our existing tendencies toward self-centeredness. The self becomes a project, a priority, and a constant point of reference. And community, in turn, becomes secondary, optional, even burdensome.
So the empathy recedes, and we keep walking over each other in the wrong shoes. And we return to chaos.
And maybe this is where Sisyphus enters the picture.
Condemned to push a boulder uphill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down, Sisyphus is often seen as a symbol of meaningless repetition. But there is another way to read him. As a reflection of persistence within futility. Maybe Albert Camus was right when he said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Because perhaps the point was never the summit. Perhaps the point is the pushing. The trying. The refusal to stop reaching for something we may never fully achieve.
I feel like our lesson from Sisyphus is that we should continue to push, to strain. But it is a boulder at the top of the hill nonetheless. We get almost to the top of understanding each other, almost to the moment of true seeing, and then something pulls it all back down. Our selfishness. Our pride. Our inability to step outside ourselves long enough to actually look. And we start again. At the bottom, boulder and all.
If true empathy is unattainable in its purest form, if we are always, in some way, limited by ourselves, then perhaps the effort itself becomes the point. True empathy is something we can strive toward. It is something worth the weight of the boulder.
Because the alternative, which is staying at the bottom and convincing ourselves that our shoes are the only shoes worth walking in, is in and of itself a kind of punishment.
Because even if we cannot eliminate the chaos of human life, we may be able to soften it through effort. Maybe not through perfect empathy, but through the refusal to stop reaching toward it.
We were made for each other. Chaos and all. The order is in the reaching.
Keep reaching.