This
is missing the forest for the trees. You are ignoring the wider corpus of the individual's experiences in favor of a single negative interaction, and then using that single interaction, isolated from all their other experiences, to judge the
entirety of their character.
> Okay. It's a job. I know choices are slim, but "its hard for my mental state" has never been a satisfactory excuse to further displease customers.
The chemical reality of the the frontal lobe getting exhausted is not an "excuse". It still misses the forest for the trees: if your frontal lobe (the part of the brain responsible for social understanding, reasoning, executive function, and information recall [0]) is taxed, you are way less likely to even understand that you're displeasing the customer! The ultimate irony here is the tool needed to understand how to not do that thing anymore is also the frontal lobe.
> Sometimes a little white lie is easier than a cold hard truth. Just ask any salesman.
That's a nice way to soften it, but pretending to empathize with someone who you're not actually empathizing with sounds psychopathic. I don't want to model my behavior nor do I want anyone else to model their behavior after an industry that is known for dark triad personalities [1]. A lie is still a lie and lying about something so intimate as feeling their experiences doesn't sit right with me at all. You should read the link I posted in my earlier comment which discusses surface acting and how it is very taxing on the individual.
> Given the author is blind, I imagine he's better than average at reading the tone of voice. He could have interpreted it wrong, but I'm sure this dismissive tone isn't new to him.
Reading a stranger's tone is a guess and negativity bias affects our perception of a stranger's intent [2]. The sum of their total negative experiences absolutely can make them interpret someone else's tone as having "dismissive" intent even though it's just as likely to be what I already described: braced speech in anticipation for a person responding to something they don't want to hear.
And there you can see negativity bias on both sides! The difference is that the representative gets no post-call time to consider what happened before they have to take the next call and they have the issue of not really having the foresight to actively introspect and keep a strong sense of understanding the situation the customer is going through. (As a reminder, both foresight and introspection require some level of functioning frontal lobe, which is already getting juiced for the next social interaction that's about to happen).
> Probably not. But I'm not sure what you want me to say. I don't want to be the same as Karen and say "suck it up, it's a job. But this is such a commin feeling on modern society. If we aren't going to collectively rise against its, we're bearing the flood alone.
I'm not sure what you mean, you effectively said "suck it up, it's a job" at the beginning of your comment when you said "Okay. It's a job". Of course no one wants to be the same as Karen, Karen doesn't want to be the same as Karen, but as I've already explained, is incapable of extricating herself from the dysfunction! Her frontal lobe is shot!
But the author? He does have that capability after the interaction. He is an author, with time to introspect. He chose to be an ass hole instead. Of course, his growth over the years has been stunted by the way he has been treated. I am not in the business of dredging up someone's life experiences and putting them on display, but he has painful experiences beyond being blind in a society not built for blind people.
But I have the privilege of being able to see all that and take it into consideration. Karen does not. She doesn't have the hint about his upbringing that I do. She probably doesn't have the time or mental capacity to introspect, and consider, if what she's doing makes people feel bad.
I can fault neither of these people for being ass holes, because that would amount to faulting them for their upbringing, faulting them for the situation they're in.
> But I'm not sure what you want me to say.
I don't want you to say anything, I want you to think about what empathy really means beyond the surface level. That this isn't a situation where anyone should be trying to say "who has experienced the most hardship" so we can pick who wins empathy and who gets labelled an ass hole for perpetuity.
I want people to stop doing the thing where they only empathize with the person most like them and instead try to feel what it's like to be like the person who is least like them. Sometimes that's not intuitive. Just because the dude is blind doesn't mean he isn't more like you than the person who isn't.
[0]: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24501-frontal-lob...
[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90775564/the-dark-side-of-the-sa...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias#Attribution_of...