Stop Calling Yourself an Empath

If you can't tell if I mean you, I mean you.

The Empath from Star Trek. From IMDb: ‘McCoy and Kirk's evaluation of Gem makes unwarranted inferences: that being an empath, being able to feel what others feel, somehow means having the ability to physically heal others, and that being mute also means being unable to understand speech.’ What they did not do, however, is treat empaths as the opposite of narcissists because it’s obviously a mind power.

It always makes me cringe when people run around calling themselves empaths and they just mean that they’re so empathetic they don’t have their own willpower or whatever. You know what an empath is? An empath is something from Star Trek and Teen Titans. If you’re an empath you’re not scoring as 100% agreeable on a Big Five personality test, if you’re an empath you’re in a locked room at a parapsychological association trying to see if you can feel a person in the other room’s feelings without any sensory cues.

Raven from Teen Titans, another actual fictional empath.

There are actually people looking for that kind of thing in real life and of course there’s a lot of controversy around it, but of course that’s not what people who describe themselves as empaths mean because people who run around saying “I’m an empath!” don’t even think about other people, much less feel their emotions as energy waves. If you were an empath, you would probably be at least a little concerned about telling everyone lest Firestarter is secretly a documentary and you get locked up in the basement of Area 51 for your purported psionic abilities because whether or not it exists the government is still testing for it in case they can get an edge from it. You’re not an empath because you’re nice and you make other people tea, and everyone besides you isn’t a narcissist. I hate to break it to you (I don’t but if you were an actual empath you’d know that) but if you’re meeting narcissists all day, you’re the narcissist. Then, I guess if there are actual empaths, the reason they’re not in the basement of Area 51 is because narcissists run around screaming “I’m an empath! I’m an empath! I’m so special look at me give you tea!” all day.

Firestarter, a pyrokinetic and not an empath avoiding the basement of Area 51.

If you keep calling yourself an empath to mean that you’re nice, I’m going to make you watch, read, play, and otherwise engage with a bunch of science fiction, because you also aren’t nice. Nice people don’t go around saying they’re nice and empaths don’t go around telling everyone they’re empaths. You still won’t care about science fiction afterwards, but at least you won’t have an excuse to keep embarrassing yourself. You will still keep embarrassing yourself though, because you don’t think about anyone or anything besides yourself. No one is going to sit down and watch a bunch of science fiction, because science fiction is already for “nerds” and “geeks” due to being hard to understand, and people who brazenly don’t think about anything besides themselves understand ideas even less than the average or even the modal person.