Empathy's expiry date

How fear and individualism is turning our most expansive human quality finite.

In the last 48 hours I’ve heard or read Joel Embiid referred to as a liability, an American patriot, a car with flat tires, permanently injured, someone who limped into the NBA and is going to limp out, short-sighted for deciding to push himself to play this season when he’s secretly been so hurt, selfish for signing such a big contract extension in September, a person in need of a nutritionist, and finished.

These observations have come from pundits and been tucked into reporting since news of Embiid being out for the rest of the season broke, but all have come from people whose profession it is to talk about the careers of people who are professional athletes. Who are, by virtue of the gig, information disseminators.

There has, in recent seasons, been a lot more attention paid to the way these same people talk about “the product” of the NBA. That label occasionally extends to its athletes, but typically “the product” refers to the basketball being played — the on-court result.

The criticism toward the way the NBA’s major information disseminators discuss the product often points out, rightly, that the basketball being played isn’t as bad as these people make it seem. And it’s true. The quality of games, their level of competition, the skill on display, actual feats, all of it can be found during a marquee matchup as much as it can on a Tuesday night game between divisional roommates late in the regular season. The worry over disparaging the product is that fans new to the game, or someone who likes to dip in and out of the season, might hear or read criticism that the product is bad and be dissuaded from watching. A worry to which I always wonder, how malleable do we take people for? Or how much faith do we put in people’s convictions, as a baseline? Which leads me to new, budding worries, but I digress.

Something that criticism of the criticism about “the product” misses is that in addition to instructions for how one might interpret the game, the other didactic disseminated is tone. I might be skeptical of the former — I trust people to see good basketball for what it is — but it’s the latter I know without a doubt has gotten into the proverbial water.

With tone, I don’t mean the obvious: Stephen A. Smith taking his up a notch and suddenly shouting over someone, or Kendrick Perkins mumbling through a barely thought out analogy. I mean a tenor of awareness, the resonance of empathy. Fleshing an athlete out as a whole consciousness instead of just warming to the details of their body. For everything being said about Embiid this week, the opposite has been said at some earlier point this season — maybe even earlier this week. Again, the point isn’t exactly comparisons reached for to fill a two minute television segment, it’s the flattening of consideration, or its outright removal, in the mind’s process of reaching for these comparisons.

In basketball, because we tend to think of it as a contained universe, the consequences of that flattening don’t seem so dire. Smith off-air would probably be the first to tell you that he can’t remember all the ways he’s compared a person’s body on-air to its monetary valuation, as a ripoff or bad deal. The perceived containment of basketball as niche ecosystem put in place a kind of handshake deal between Smith, or media in general, and their audience. The deal assumes that we don’t go around talking about or treating people like assets and objects in our “real lives”, that we understand these terms and their applications are reserved for this closed world of hobby, for basketball’s bubble.

I imagine, at a point that preceded my time in this industry (an aside: I don’t think the colloquial reference to “this industry” by me, my peers, athletes, its executives, helps to burst this bubble at all), this agreement worked because the outside tenor of the wider world was a little less frantic. Unspoken social constructs exist because at some point they were all people needed to stay to the boundaries of their culture and its inherent values. The pressure — or shame — of slipping outside these bounds was strong enough that no one would. So was the desire to uphold them. I think largely because their ideals (kindness, consideration, understanding, empathy, compassion, respect) are such loose concepts to begin with. Long-valued human concepts that our greatest thinkers, artists and leaders concerned themselves with over thousands of years, but still loose, empirical. Felt in the gut.

Basketball, like all sports, has for some time ceased to exist as a sanctified steady state. It’d be a worthwhile historic as much as anthropologic exercise to try and pin-point the when of its imaginary walls coming down. One clue is that like in our broader culture, you can tell we’re in post-whatever when the once-rallying cries subvert into jokes (e.g. “Stick to sports” — used now, when it is, with high-irony). What this means is that there’s no containment anymore. Not of keeping referential language and behaviour in, or the world out.

On the other hand, when faced with the wider world, pretending basketball still exists separate from it can be a comfort.

Venture outside the NBA’s never-ending discourse for a few hours and become overwhelmed at the apparent lack of social constructs, the social bounds all but frayed. Digital acceleration of monoculture’s creep has turned everything porous, with the general reflex being to turn inward, to grow single-serving and isolative. It feels like we’ve lost the societal plot.

We’ve also botched the chicken and egg of it that makes determining the way out difficult. Have we given up empathy because we’ve turned our individualized worlds into protective bubbles, or did we turn ourselves into self-serving, perennially afraid solitary states because we lost empathy?

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I didn’t want to, but I watched the nearly 50-minute televised meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump.

Thinking and talking about the United States so much in the past month has made me feel insane, not to mention exceedingly anxious and defeatist, but I wanted to try and see where the lines blurred. Where it went from the capitulation Trump was anticipating to total collapse of Trump and J.D. Vance’s egos at the barest pressure. An absence of capitulation being the perceived pressure.

Like when Vance, attempting to heave himself upright from the congealed butter coloured couch, huffs at Zelenskyy, “Have you said thank you once, this entire meeting?” His eyes ferreting around the room with every word, desperate for approval, “Say thank you.” It’s the kind of manipulative language and tone that sets alarm bells ringing in my head, because it’s what habitual gas-lighters, abusers of power, and worse readily reach for when they feel the scales tip away from over-weighted on their behalf.

What stuck out most to me, beyond how much my own heart rate climbed watching, was Trump’s teeth snapping to full gnash when Zelenskyy used the word “feel”.

During war, Zelenskyy says, everyone has problems, “Even you, but you have nice ocean, and don’t feel now. But you will feel it in the future.” Trump interrupts, muttering “You don’t know” over and over, before finally breaking free of himself with, “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.” His hands draw an invisible line in the air. “Don’t tell us. What we’re going to feel,” he repeats, enunciating to separate the “we” (the U.S., him and Vance, maybe just him) from the future act, from feeling. “You’re in no position to dictate that,” he makes a gun out of his thumb and forefinger, points it at the Ukrainian president. “You’re in no position to dictate what we’re gonna feel.”

Notice he never says how they’ll feel, only what. The firm conclusion of emotion or the implied pressure of a global conflict, rippling out. Influence, Zelenskyy clarifies, they’ll feel influence of the war. But Trump is still stuck, tires spinning, on being told what he may someday feel. “Strong” is what he lands on. We’ll feel strong, he says.

Strong, I’ll point out, not a feeling. You can feel strong in your body, in your convictions, but it’s not an emotion.

It doesn’t matter anyway, as Zelenskyy tries to point out multiple times he meant what any sane, globally conscious person would — that there’s always a chance a years-long war, in which your country has been one of many sending money, weaponry and aid to, will have an affect on the world, and your country within it. What’s made clear (or clearer) is how separate Trump sees himself. Not only from the world, which he’s yanking the U.S. out of into an isolationism it isn’t built to sustain, but from the country he represents. He isn’t bound to anything. Not rule of law, not soft or hard powers, not a constitution, certainly not to empathy and its minor inconveniences. Whatever presents to him as pressure, he cant bear, so he slashes it loose. Beholden to nobody. An American ideal.

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Has empathy always existed in sports? Yes, and though it’s been cordoned away in some back tunnel arena of sports’ living psyche, I think fandom was invented as its clearest conduit.

Fandom is still one of the only avenues for some to express their unhindered, unselfconscious emotions. To cry and laugh and grab the person closest, crush them tight in an embrace whether they know them or not. Some might call that tribalism, but empathy’s ties go deeper. It’s why two people who might never meet, or get to talking when they do, can do it in an instant through a shared fandom.

Empathy in sports, in basketball, has grown more convoluted as the walls between it and the world grew thinner, came down. Empathy in basketball now comes with caveats. It’s why there’s such hesitation to extended empathy without timeline, or without a promise of equal return to expenditure.

Embiid’s pain is ongoing. I won’t guess at someone’s health to say that his recurring knee injuries are a sign of something deteriorative, as is the case with Kawhi Leonard, but they share the same aggravator: basketball. Maybe Embiid’s injury, like Leonard’s, slows when he steps away from the game, but the exacerbating environment remains the clinching point. For Embiid and Leonard, for fans, media, and for empathy.

Much of the debate around Embiid’s injury, and the decision to have him forego the rest of the season, swings back to desire for clarity of the future. That if we know what to expect, have transparency about Embiid’s treatments to this point and those yet to come, we’ll be sated. Sated from uncertainty, or having these same discussions next season, off the hook from having to extend more empathy in the face of so much unknown.

How does knowing when, or how many times, stem cells get shot into the soft tissue of Embiid’s knee, better prime my compassion? Does knowing how much the cartilage around his knee has deteriorated in granular detail — is it bone on bone, does he feel the sensation of his body grinding away on itself each time he pivots and cuts — extend my upper limit for sympathy two months into next season instead of two weeks?

You can’t pre-empt health, it is’t a static quality. Empathy is the same, yet the expectation that we may be prompted to feel something for someone, at some point in the future, seems to have become too much to bear. Empathy with an expiry, a payment date looming large, and us cartoonishly pulling out our pockets, showing we aren’t good for it.

What I wish more people knew, or that I didn’t think was fading from collective understanding — that empathy’s not finite, that the less qualifiers you place on it the more expansive it gets, that it saves, that it roots you to place and time while propelling you far beyond yourself. That you don’t have to lift a finger.