What’s the most underrated life skill?
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I think the most underrated life skill is empathy.
Not sympathy. Not simply feeling sorry for somebody. Empathy is the ability — and, maybe more importantly, the willingness — to stop looking at everything through your own eyes long enough to wonder what it looks like through someone else’s.
That seems to be in increasingly short supply.
There’s a line in the book of Judges that has always stuck with me: “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That was describing a society that had lost its center, and sometimes it feels uncomfortably familiar. We become so focused on how something affects us, what we want, what we believe, what we deserve and whether we’re winning that we barely stop to consider what our words or actions might be doing to somebody else.
I’m not sure that problem is global, but I’m pretty confident it’s a serious problem in this country. We’ve lost a lot of our shared moral center, and one of the clearest symptoms is our increasing inability to see anything through anyone’s eyes but our own.
That includes listening. Real listening. You can’t understand what somebody is feeling if you’re doing all the talking, and you probably won’t understand it if you spend the entire time they’re speaking rehearsing the brilliant thing you plan to say next. Active listening matters because empathy requires information. You have to care enough to find out what is actually happening inside the other person.
I put a fair amount of the blame on social media. The platforms benefit from keeping us angry, divided and engaged, and anger is much easier to sustain when the person on the other side becomes a category instead of a human being. Republican. Democrat. Liberal. Conservative. Christian. Atheist. Boomer. Millennial. Pick your label. Once we reduce people to labels, it becomes much easier to stop wondering why they think, hurt, fear or believe the things they do.
That worries me. There are plenty of people who believe our divisions could eventually become something much uglier and more violent. I hope they’re wrong. But regardless of where all of this leads, much of the hostility we already live with is unnecessary.
Empathy wouldn’t make everyone agree. It shouldn’t. Sometimes the other person really is wrong. Sometimes I’m the one who’s wrong.
But imagine what would change if, before reacting, we put our own motives and grievances on pause long enough to ask one simple question:
What might this look like through their eyes?
That wouldn’t solve everything. But it would be a pretty good place to start.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
