1.
Taking late night flights from Bangalore and Bombay, last week made me wonder how safe I’ve assumed the world is. My parents would never take a taxi after 10pm and here I am taking auto’s at 3am. With no worry, I walk on the side of roads texting while cars zoom past. I enter my credit card and UPI pin while surrounded by people. I sometimes forget to double check if the car is locked when parking on the road. The cook at my previous apartment had keys to the house. Aren’t all of these (at least slightly) scary situations to think about? How did I become so accustomed to safety that even a thought of ill intention doesn’t cross my mind? How safe do you feel in this world? When travelling alone? late at night? or talking to a stranger? or taking out your wallet in a crowded market?
Have we as a generation suddenly become very accustomed to safety? I suppose that can be true, and one reason for it could be the reliability technology offers. Transaction never fails, things always arrive on time, you can always get a cab, you can afford to go out with only your phone in your pocket and no wallet. The result? World feels reliable and predictable and plenty of these incidents make us believe that safety is a guarantee.
2.
Is being empathetic a hindrance to taking tough and quick decisions?
My reasoning - Being empathetic involves, bringing someone’s emotion to the same level as yours. Empathy doesn’t aim to arrive at a conclusion, but to provide a co-existence of feelings. You don’t decide who won the argument, but rather try to learn each other’s perspective and leave it at that. If you have the ability to equalize someone’s emotion, however trivial or irrational it is, you have the ability to inflate an emotion. When it comes to decision making, you have both supporting and opposing feelings. And while the aim is to measure (and compare) them and choose the trade-off, empathetic people would probably put them on the same level (thus inflating the minor emotion) and thus have a harder time taking the trade-off.