I think cultivating curiosity about others is integral to building empathy, but it's a lifelong practice. I still find it very easy to project my own experiences onto others - an easy shortcut that drains my interest in them and makes listening hard. After all, if I feel I already know what's important to know about them, why listen?
Where I've found the most personal growth has been in continually re-learning the strangeness of other people's inner worlds. I try to imagine each person I meet inhabits an alternate universe, just as rich and nuanced as I feel my own is. So a healthy spirit of exploration and generosity helps, although it requires treating yourself the same.
A good shorthand I heard a long time ago from someone else on HN: when someone is expressing a problem to you, consider it your job to build a picture of their mental state that you can repeat back to them and have them recognize as their own. Good luck!
I often think that if I had one supernatural wish to make, I’d like to inhabit the inner-life and sensations of someone else. See, feel, hear, think, intuit, and fear like they do. Not as an observer, but as a first-hand experience. Whether that person is dumb, hyper-intelligent, manic, depressed, or autistic.
As I mature I’m starting to appreciate how very different our inner-experiences can be. Even for something as simple as what we experience when we count silently in our heads: Some people hear a voice counting numbers, some see the numbers without auditory cues, and some feel the counting as pulses in their bodies.
For this reason, I would very much like to inhabit someone else to feel just how divergent those experiences may be.
I think we have something that emulates it: operational systems. iPhone vs Android, Windows vs Linux. Although for the experience to be as divergent as with humans we would need millions of OSs.
Experimenting with different doses of psychedelics can give some insight into differing states possible in your own mind, which may be somewhat of a proxy representation.
Along the same lines, observing how different people react to different psychoactive substances (and talking to them about what they experience) also gives quite valuable insight into the diverse inner lives of people, imo.
I also believe that that might be one of the main reasons of alcohol having established itself as the 'drug of choice' in society, even though there would have been a number of alternatives. Alcohol works great as a social lubricant because in moderate doses, it puts most people in very similar internal states, thus narrowing the gap between their internal worlds and making it easier to relate to others.
With cannabis for example, even at low doses the drug affects people quite differently and makes it more complicated to model other people's inside world.
Where I've found the most personal growth has been in continually re-learning the strangeness of other people's inner worlds. I try to imagine each person I meet inhabits an alternate universe, just as rich and nuanced as I feel my own is. So a healthy spirit of exploration and generosity helps, although it requires treating yourself the same.
A good shorthand I heard a long time ago from someone else on HN: when someone is expressing a problem to you, consider it your job to build a picture of their mental state that you can repeat back to them and have them recognize as their own. Good luck!