Imagine you were someone else

How can we change the way things are if we don’t step outside our own little world? Or in other words: As long as we stay in our ego bubble, why should we care about others?

EMPATHY is the capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another being.

What if you could be someone else for a month or two? And if this was possible, once you’d enter your own skin again – would you continue living in the same way?

• Imagine you were a person sweating 16 hours per day, seven days per week in a crappy Bangladeshi clothes factory – would you still buy that bargain shirt? Would you still be indifferent to how your shoes are made?
• Imagine you were a cow or a chicken for a month – afterwards, would you still put animals into crowded factories, with no light and hardly any air to breathe?
• Imagine you were a tree – would you keep polluting the land with plastic and pesticides and cut down forrests for short-term profit and comfort?
• And now the hardest one: imagine, just for one moment, that you were a young child – would you continue to destroy our natural world, using up all finite resources and really not giving a shit about future generations?

Empathy is about moving closer together. It’s about sharing, caring and becoming aware that we’re ALL sitting in the same boat! And yes, sometimes it might be difficult, but: wouldn't it be much more fun if everybody in that boat had a good ride? Even the cows and stupid ones...

For further reading: The power of empathy!