The Empathy Gap

CHAPTER 6Influencing and inspiring through empathy

It was lunchtime at school and I was super excited. I was about 14 years old at the time and I had just picked up from the tuckshop a parcel of culinary beauty. It was a white bread roll stuffed with roast chicken, hot chips and gravy. It was a delicacy that they rarely made at the tuckshop and coming from a poor family, I could rarely afford it. But on this day, the stars had aligned and I found myself sitting with my group of friends, a massive smile across my face and about to shove the roll into my salivating mouth.

Just as I was about to take the first bite, a friend of mine touched me on the shoulder. I turned to see her staring at me with a disappointed look on her face. She began to berate me for eating the roll, going into detail describing the number of chickens that die each year, the horrible conditions of the farms and the suffering that millions of farm animals endure just so cruel people like me can eat things like the roll I was holding in my hands.

I was immediately annoyed by her finger wagging and chastising over my lunch for three reasons. First, I was 14 and it was lunchtime so I wasn't really interested in thinking about anything. Second, I was deeply in love with this bread-encased goodness and she was trying to come between us, and finally, I was pretty sure I'd seen her eating a hot dog the week before! Notwithstanding it could be argued that there are pretty limited amounts of meat in a hot dog, they ...