My empathy is not reactive but reflexive. It is not emotional and human but rather cosmic and existential.

 When someone cries, it awakens literally no feeling in me. Not out of indifference, but out of irrelevance. Because humans are one kind of being, and I am another. That is, I neither feel their pain nor feel the urge to “relieve” them; I simply watch them as if observing and recording the traits and functions of an alien. Because my empathy is not reactive but reflexive. It is not emotional and human but rather cosmic and existential. As such, it is not affected by such instant and cheap emotions—whether crying, anger, or laughter. My sense of solidarity can, at most, be directed not at a specific suffering person but at humanity in general in the face of suffering. For it is either too high or too deep for such surface matters.