Disclaimer: This post was written on September 10, 2026, exactly one year after the events discussed in this piece. It may be published a few days after that date, but the reflections and perspective expressed here were written on September 10, 2026.
A year ago today, I started to realize something about myself.
Not something completely new, exactly.
More like something that had been sitting inside my writing for years, quietly developing in the background, waiting for me to finally recognize what the hell it was.
I eventually came to call it Radical Empathy.
And no, I don’t mean that I woke up one morning and suddenly invented a philosophy.
That’s not really how it happened.
If anything, that’s the funny part.
Looking back at years of things I’ve written, I can see pieces of it everywhere.
I just didn’t necessarily have the words for it yet.
For years, I was writing about people. About society. About morality. About violence. About politics. About disagreements. About grief. About compassion. About stupidity. About hypocrisy. About the strange ways human beings interact with one another.
Sometimes I was writing poetry.
Sometimes essays.
Sometimes blog posts.
Sometimes fiction.
Sometimes I was just ranting about something that pissed me off.
And somewhere underneath all of that was a recurring idea:
Maybe understanding someone doesn’t require agreeing with them.
Maybe compassion doesn’t require approval.
Maybe empathy doesn’t mean pretending that harmful behavior isn’t harmful.
Maybe we can oppose someone’s ideas without deciding that person is inherently worthless.
Maybe we can condemn an action without turning the person who committed it into a cartoon villain.
Maybe we can recognize someone’s humanity while still saying, very clearly, I think you’re wrong.
Those ideas weren’t necessarily organized in my head as one coherent philosophy.
Not yet.
They were fragments.
And over time, those fragments kept showing up.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Until eventually I had to look at them and say:
Wait a minute.
I’ve been saying the same damn thing for years.
I just didn’t realize it.
It Wasn’t Born in 2025
That’s probably the biggest thing I want to emphasize.
When I talk about Radical Empathy, I’m not claiming that I suddenly became an empathetic person in 2025.
Nor am I claiming that I suddenly developed an entire worldview out of thin air.
The philosophy had been developing for years.
The difference is that around this time last year, I started becoming much more conscious of it.
I started connecting the dots.
I started realizing that all these seemingly separate thoughts were actually connected.
And that realization happened during a period when the world felt particularly fucking insane.
There were plenty of reasons to become cynical.
Plenty of reasons to retreat into tribalism.
Plenty of reasons to decide that those people were the problem.
You know the drill.
We’ve all seen it.
Someone does something awful.
People immediately start cheering.
Someone says something stupid.
People immediately decide they’re stupid.
Someone belongs to the wrong political camp.
Suddenly everything about them is evil.
Someone commits a crime.
People start treating them like a fictional supervillain.
Someone has an opinion we despise.
And somehow we’ve gone from I strongly disagree with you to you are fundamentally less human than I am.
That progression has always bothered me.
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how dangerous it can become.
Because once you’ve convinced yourself that another human being is fundamentally beneath you, there aren’t many limits left.
And that’s where empathy becomes important.
Not the fluffy, feel-good version of empathy.
The radical version.
The version that is actually difficult.
Radical Empathy Isn’t About Letting Everything Slide
I think the word “empathy” sometimes gets misunderstood.
People hear empathy and think:
Oh, so you just excuse everybody’s behavior?
No.
Absolutely fucking not.
Understanding why somebody did something does not mean saying what they did was okay.
Those are two completely different things.
I can understand why someone is angry without agreeing with what they did because of that anger.
I can understand why someone believes something without believing that their belief is correct.
I can understand someone’s trauma without believing that their trauma gives them permission to hurt somebody else.
I can have compassion for someone who made a terrible decision while still believing that there should be consequences for that decision.
That’s where I think empathy gets interesting.
Because the easy version of empathy is:
I understand you because you’re like me.
The harder version is:
I am going to try to understand you even though you’re not like me.
And the truly difficult version is:
I am going to try to understand you even when I strongly disagree with you.
That’s the part that makes it radical.
It isn’t difficult to empathize with someone you already like.
It isn’t difficult to feel compassion for someone whose worldview mirrors your own.
The real test comes when you encounter somebody whose beliefs make you angry.
Somebody who annoys you.
Somebody who has done something you find reprehensible.
Somebody you think is completely wrong.
Can you still remember that they’re a human being?
That’s the question.
And Then There Was September 10
A year ago today, Charlie Kirk was killed.
I don’t want this entire piece to be about Charlie Kirk.
It isn’t.
But I can’t honestly talk about the moment when I started consciously developing Radical Empathy without acknowledging the context in which that realization happened.
Because his death forced a lot of people to confront something uncomfortable.
People can have profoundly different political beliefs.
They can disagree about almost everything.
They can dislike one another.
They can criticize one another.
They can believe that the other person’s ideas are harmful.
And none of that makes murder acceptable.
That’s not complicated to me.
You don’t have to admire someone to believe they should be alive.
You don’t have to agree with someone to believe they deserve basic human dignity.
You don’t have to like someone to oppose killing them.
And I think that’s part of what Radical Empathy means to me.
Humanity isn’t something you earn by agreeing with me.
That’s a pretty important distinction.
Because if I only believe that people deserve compassion when they’re good, agreeable, intelligent, politically compatible, or otherwise convenient for me, then my compassion has conditions.
And maybe that’s not empathy at all.
Maybe that’s just favoritism.
Looking Back at My Own Work
The strangest part of developing this philosophy has been looking backward.
Because suddenly older pieces of my writing started looking different.
I’d read something I wrote years ago and think:
Wait.
That’s basically the same idea.
Not literally.
Not necessarily using the same terminology.
But the underlying instinct was there.
Sometimes it was about trying to understand another person’s perspective.
Sometimes it was about rejecting unnecessary hatred.
Sometimes it was about criticizing people while still recognizing their humanity.
Sometimes it was about questioning my own assumptions.
Sometimes it was simply about asking why the fuck we’re so eager to destroy one another.
And that’s when I realized that maybe my writing wasn’t as disconnected as I had thought.
Maybe the blog posts weren’t just blog posts.
Maybe the poems weren’t just poems.
Maybe the essays weren’t just essays.
Maybe they were all little pieces of a larger worldview that I hadn’t consciously assembled yet.
That’s one of the beautiful things about creating things over a long period of time.
Sometimes you don’t know what you’re building until you look backward.
You create one thing.
Then another.
Then another.
Years pass.
And eventually you step back and realize:
Oh shit. There’s a pattern here.
I Don’t Think I Have All the Answers
And here’s another important part.
I don’t think Radical Empathy means that I’ve figured everything out.
Quite the opposite.
If anything, Radical Empathy requires me to remain willing to question myself.
That’s uncomfortable.
Because it’s much easier to construct a worldview where I am the reasonable one and everybody else is the problem.
It’s much harder to say:
Maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe I misunderstood something.
Maybe I have a blind spot.
Maybe I am reacting emotionally.
Maybe there’s something about another person’s perspective that I haven’t considered.
That doesn’t mean I have to abandon my principles every time somebody challenges me.
It means I should at least be willing to examine them.
Because if my philosophy is supposed to be about empathy, then it can’t stop at other people.
I have to apply it to myself too.
I have to be willing to look at my own thoughts and ask:
Why do I believe this?
What experiences shaped this belief?
What evidence supports it?
What evidence contradicts it?
Am I actually listening to this person, or am I just waiting for my turn to respond?
Those questions matter.
Maybe Changing the World Starts Smaller Than We Think
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to change the world.
And I don’t think changing the world necessarily begins with changing the entire world.
That’s an impossible place to start.
Maybe it starts with one interaction.
One conversation.
One disagreement.
One moment where you decide not to insult somebody.
One moment where you decide to listen.
One moment where you could respond with hatred but choose curiosity instead.
One moment where you recognize that the person in front of you is more complicated than the label you’ve given them.
That doesn’t mean every disagreement ends peacefully.
It doesn’t mean everyone suddenly becomes friends.
It doesn’t mean evil disappears.
It doesn’t mean accountability disappears.
It means we stop making dehumanization our default response to conflict.
And maybe that matters.
Maybe a lot.
Because the world is made up of individual interactions.
Cultures are built from individual people.
Movements are built from individual people.
Communities are built from individual people.
History is built from individual people.
So maybe changing the world isn’t always about finding the biggest possible lever.
Maybe sometimes it’s about changing what happens in the smallest moments.
A Philosophy That Took Years to Arrive
That’s why I don’t really consider Radical Empathy a philosophy that I “came up with” in 2025.
It feels more like a philosophy I arrived at.
It was developing before I knew it was developing.
It was hiding in old poems.
It was hiding in old essays.
It was hiding in arguments.
It was hiding in things I wrote when I was angry.
It was hiding in things I wrote when I was sad.
It was hiding in things I wrote when I was trying to understand somebody else.
And eventually, all those little pieces started connecting.
A year ago, I began to consciously recognize what they were pointing toward.
I gave the philosophy a name.
Radical Empathy.
But the name isn’t the important part.
The idea is.
And even the idea isn’t finished.
I’m not sure I want it to be.
Because if I ever reach a point where I believe I’ve completely figured out humanity, morality, politics, compassion, conflict, and every other complicated thing that makes us human, then I’ve probably stopped listening.
And that would defeat the entire fucking point.
So maybe this is still developing.
Maybe it will keep developing for the rest of my life.
Maybe ten years from now I’ll look back at what I’m writing today and realize that I was still only scratching the surface.
Honestly?
I hope so.
Because that would mean I kept growing.
One Year Later
A year ago, I started to realize what Radical Empathy meant to me.
Today, I can look backward and see that it had been there for much longer.
I just hadn’t recognized it.
And that’s probably the most interesting thing about it.
Our philosophies aren’t always created in a single moment.
Sometimes they’re assembled piece by piece.
A poem here.
An essay there.
A conversation.
A mistake.
A disagreement.
A loss.
A realization.
A moment where somebody surprises you.
A moment where you surprise yourself.
Years of experiences slowly become years of thoughts.
And years of thoughts slowly become principles.
Eventually, you look around and realize:
I’ve been building something this whole time.
Maybe that’s what happened to me.
I didn’t suddenly become Radical Empathy.
I slowly became the person who could finally recognize it.
And now that I recognize it, I have to keep working on it.
Because if I actually believe empathy can change the world, then it can’t just be something I write about.
It has to be something I practice.
Something I challenge.
Something I fail at and try again.
Something that continues evolving alongside me.
Because maybe the world doesn’t need another person who thinks they have all the answers.
Maybe it needs more people willing to ask better questions.
Maybe it needs more people willing to listen.
Maybe it needs more people willing to disagree without dehumanizing.
Maybe it needs more people willing to say:
I think you’re wrong.
But you’re still human.
And maybe that’s where changing the world begins.