The Empathy Tax

Ever since the iPhone 1 was released, I’ve had an unhealthy relationship with my phone. I know, it’s a unique story to me right? No one has EVER had an unhealthy relationship with their phone before!

Let me tell you a little more by giving you an example. When I first joined mFoundry, to help run our largest account (I don’t know if I’m supposed to say the name so let me just say that it rhymes with “Bank of America”) within a few months I was important enough to be needed, but not seasoned enough to know… well, anything really.

Cut to me taking my first real vacation, going to do our typical summer vacation of going to Tahoe, but the first time with my wife’s family (this is before we were married which is relevant to me but not to anyone else lol). But either way, we’re driving up to Tahoe, and I’m a typical asshole dude who is like “no I have to drive” so when I got the first phone call from work I ignored it and moved on. Then I got a second call. Then a third, and I thought “yes I’m on vacation but I have to answer”.

My now wife, did NOT like the idea of me working on vacation. She rightfully said, you earned vacation and you shouldn’t work during it (her dad was a very successful business person and frequently had to work on vacations and she saw me going down a similar path). I said I had to do it, and took the call. I then sat on the phone with a poor overwhelmed developer who was just trying to upload an app to the apple App Store and kept getting rejected (this is early days of the App Store, so the rules were even more esoteric and crazy than they are today).

I had no idea what to do. I just had to talk through it with him, and eventually, while we sat in the parking lot of a Starbucks in Auburn (half way to Tahoe). My wife was pissed. I was upset that I had clearly made her upset by not just letting the call go and hoping they’d figure it out on their own. And I was upset because I still felt like I did the right thing even though everyone felt bad (other than my developer who got everything done and was able to be successful!).

“So what, who cares” amirite.

On the one hand it was a great learning experience for me in the value and need for being empathetic for the people I worked with and to take their requests for help as genuine and use that as an opportunity to come to a good outcome. On the other hand, it also validated that I would need to sometimes give up on my own happiness and time off to be helpful (and to completely piss off my wife).

For years, I would keep relearning this lesson. I’d have some “urgent” work need, then I would jump, and my wife would be rightfully annoyed or straight up pissed that I was spending my time doing work.

It was one of the biggest strains we had for years, and it was all stemming from my inability to see the difference between being helpful and being my own person who had my own needs. I was never there putting the mask on myself first, I’d always try and help others first.

It was draining. And chaotic. I couldn’t predict my schedule, I couldn’t commit to vacations, I couldn’t commit to even a day off. My family would get sick and need me, and I’d be on the phone while “helping”. It was honestly really gross looking back on it, but I thought “that’s what you need to do to get ahead”.

What’s funny is, all of this was before I ever had anyone reporting to me. This was just how I felt like I had to operate to be good at working. The shift to realize that the cost of empathy was incredibly high didn’t really hit me until I was responsible for other people directly.

I started shifting my working style, because I couldn’t be fully involved with projects and work and also be fully there for my employees. I started having to make choices that would benefit the entire team, while also starting to look at the fact that I wasn’t creating the home life that I wanted.

It started with delegating more and more of the workload and decision making power to the people that worked for me. I knew their strengths and weaknesses and knew that they could handle it. But I also knew that I COULDN’T handle it. I had to let go a little, because there were more important things to care about.

I started getting people coming to me for all the things that weren’t just work related, and the empathy tax changed, from giving up all of my time for “the work” to being for “the people”. I could handle the empathy tax with the work, because I saw it as a thing that could be successful or unsuccessful, but that success wasn’t life or death. It did still piss my wife off, but I also figured “that would work itself out”.

It did work itself out, but not the way I thought it would.

My wife couldn’t get behind the idea of caring more about a project than being present in a given moment, but it’s a lot easier to have the conversation of “this person is in trouble because of xyz and I am the best person to help them”.

And I thought I could handle that easily. I was good at my job (well, good enough for people to keep giving me more responsibility, who knows if that’s “good” or just “a sucker” but still lol). I could do this.

But, people are harder. The empathy tax was WAY higher once people were involved.

I had people who were yelled at to the point where they were crying on calls, I had people who were convinced they couldn’t do what I asked them to do (they could lol), I had people who were having family problems, people who experienced harassment, and I managed people through the pandemic.

And the cost of dealing with their problems was, to do it well and to be empathetic and not just see things from my own perspective meant inhabiting really shitty situations regularly. And situations that felt like I wasn’t qualified to deal with. So I started trying to learn more and read books to get better. Which is a weird thing to see from your husband when you see him as “not a reader” (I REALLY TRY BUT THEN I GET DISTRACTED) and yet he’ll read about work.

But it wasn’t about WORK it was about PEOPLE.

And that was when I started feeling the tax even more.

My philosophy of leadership tends to err on the side of overwhelming honesty and empathy. And as a result, I couldn’t just tell people the company line. I couldn’t just follow the flow, or wait things out and hope it would be fine in the end. I would proactively try to understand people and then get them the info they needed before they even knew they needed it.

But that meant being on my phone all the time. Whether it was again looking at texts or im’s or emails or whatever. I just keep having to know what people needed and do it ASAP.

But I noticed, that wasn’t the way everyone worked. There were leaders who were my peers who were hard to get a hold of, or impossible to get to answer a question, or wouldn’t stick up for their people because it was easier to just let them be the reason things failed. And I couldn’t understand why they would do that. It felt so shitty.

Then it hit me. It’s EASIER to not do all the extra emotional work I was doing. And no one was ASKING me to do all that work. I was creating it for myself. Because it was important to me! I thought about it from my own experience and I would have LOVED to have someone standing up for me, being constantly available when I needed them, and someone who I knew had my back no matter what.

But that wasn’t the job of a “manager”. Managers just do what’s needed to keep you there and keep the company making money off of you. Which has its place! And I had to grapple with the fact that I was making a CHOICE to give myself all this emotional labor and decide, is it worth it?

I really wanted (and want) it to not be worth it. It would have been so nice.

But I couldn’t. I had to keep going because it was not about the work. It wasn’t about the people even! It was about my own values and identifying what made me feel like I was doing the right thing. I needed to be ok with the fact that I wasn’t striving for external validation but rather internal validation.

And that extra cost was something I would have to bear. No company was going to value it like I did because companies didn’t see it as their core value. Their core value is supporting their investors or shareholders. And I get it. It’s fine. It’s why I’ll probably never be an entrepreneur or if I am it will never be a thing that takes over the world. Because if I got to pick between making myself a multi billionaire or making one person feel valued, I’d pick the person every time.

Don’t get me wrong. I day dream about winning the lottery all the time lol. I buy tickets when it gets over a billion dollars then I day dream about what I’d do with my time. And you know what it comes back to? Doing things for people. I would volunteer my time to helping in some way.

Because in the end, there’s a huge emotional and mental cost to being empathetic and caring about people. It’s exhausting. It’s painful. And sometimes it feels like it’s too much, and you just want to stop. But to me that cost is a part of being in a society. It’s part of being a person. And I feel best when I’m helping people.

So could I make my life less complicated and reduce the emotional cost of work? Probably. But would it be worth it?

Nope.