Incomplete Empathy

Most people don’t truly empathize—they project their own feelings instead of imagining others’ realities. This shortcut distorts judgment and deepens misunderstanding.

When people talk about hypocrisy, they usually mean inconsistency: the politician who preaches family values but cheats, the friend who rails against gossip but spreads it. But I think this definition misses the more common kind. The everyday version of hypocrisy isn’t about lies. It’s about simulation. It’s when we judge others without paying the cost of imagining what it’s like to be them.

If hypocrisy means anything, it’s this: pretending to understand someone else’s life while running the simulation with the wrong inputs. Most of the time we don’t lie about others; we mis-model them. And this turns out to be worse, because you can catch a liar, but you can’t prove a bad model wrong until it fails in the real world—and by then it has already done its damage.

The Cheap Emulator

Think about how people explain themselves versus how they explain others. When I snap at a friend after a bad night of sleep, I know I was tired. When someone else snaps at me, I think: jerk. Inside my own head I use context. Outside, I use character. Inside: circumstances, exceptions, excuses. Outside: permanent flaws.

This is the hypocrisy most of us practice daily, though we never call it that. We simulate others with our own emotions, our own bandwidth, our own tolerance. But the world doesn’t run on your CPU. If empathy means anything, it’s paying the computational cost of running a more faithful emulator of someone else’s head. And very few people are willing to pay that cost.

The result is a strange asymmetry: we think we’re fair because we remember being fair to ourselves. But our fairness doesn’t survive translation outward. The cheap emulator only works in one direction.

Why We Dodge Real Empathy

The excuse is that empathy is hard. But “hard” here means “painful.” When you really model someone else, you inherit their weight. You discover that the manipulative person is manipulative not by accident but because that’s how they are. You realize that the person who seems lazy may be carrying a burden invisible to you. And when you see too clearly, the world doesn’t get easier—it gets heavier.

I’ve felt the opposite failure: hyper-empathy. For people on the autism spectrum, this can be an unbearable problem. You sense everything so vividly that you have to dull it to survive. I’ve pretended not to understand, not because I didn’t, but because understanding would have burned me. That’s the paradox: too much empathy can be paralyzing, so most people take the opposite route—too little.

But the common shortcut is to skip empathy altogether, substitute projection, and then call the result judgment. Which means most people’s understanding of others is wrong in the same predictable way: too simple, too cheap, too self-centered.

How the Mis-Simulation Breaks the World

What’s the harm? Why not let people run their cheap emulators? Because it breaks everything downstream of human interaction.

• Relationships. You punish people for behavior you don’t understand, and then mistake the damage you’ve caused for evidence that they were bad to begin with.

• Work and policy. You design incentives for imaginary users. Real users don’t respond, and then you blame them for being irrational.

• Culture. A society of mutual projection becomes a society of mutual grievance. Everyone is an injured party. No one respects anyone else, because no one has truly simulated anyone else.

This is why societies without respect decay so fast. Everyone feels like a victim, and when you’re the victim, you don’t have to empathize with anyone. You only have to win.

Hypocrisy as Empathy Debt

So maybe hypocrisy is best understood not as dishonesty but as unpaid empathy debt. Every time you declare “I’d never do that” without asking what would have to be true for you to do it, you borrow. Every time you project your own pain tolerance onto someone else, you borrow. Over time the debt compounds. The longer you avoid paying, the worse your judgments get, until your whole map of other people is wrong.

That’s why people so often seem shocked when friends betray them or companies fail in predictable ways. It’s not that the world changed. It’s that their model was always too cheap, and reality finally called the loan.

The Survival Strategy: Not Playing the Victim

I think the only way out is twofold. First, refuse the victim script. The moment you frame yourself as the primary injured party, you lose the ability to model others fairly. Victimhood is the fastest way to close the emulator window.

Second, hold on to ideals. Truth is not enough; it’s too sharp on its own. What keeps empathy possible is respect—respect that the other person, even at their worst, is still a full human being whose constraints you don’t yet see. And paired with respect is hope: the belief that solutions exist, that surplus is possible, that peace isn’t a fantasy.

Without those ideals, empathy just collapses into despair. With them, it becomes bearable to pay the cost of running a better emulator.

The Test

How do you know if you’re practicing hypocrisy in this deeper sense? A simple test: before condemning, ask, “What would have to be true for their behavior to make sense?” If you can’t answer, you haven’t earned your certainty.

It doesn’t mean you’ll always excuse them. Sometimes the answer is ugly: some people really are manipulative, abusive, selfish. But even then, understanding the mechanism is better than mis-simulation. At least then you’re working with reality instead of a cartoon.

Conclusion

The everyday kind of hypocrisy isn’t about masks. It’s about mirrors. We look at other people but see ourselves—our energy levels, our pain thresholds, our preferences—reflected back, and then we mistake that projection for insight.

Empathy, in its true form, isn’t drowning in other people’s pain. It’s the discipline of running a faithful model long enough to respect them before you judge. And if we don’t do that, we’re not just hypocrites in the traditional sense. We’re worse: we’re critics of realities we’ve never bothered to visit