In our modern-day world, individuals tend to exhibit empathy by responding reactively rather than proactively to tragic circumstances, as the aftermath of a tragedy can bring public attention to the suffering of many individuals. If individuals were more proactive than reactive in facing global challenges, empathy would likely propagate with greater ease. In the brief argumentative and thought-provoking essay “Is Empathy Overrated” by Canadian-American psychology professor Paul Bloom, he asserts, “Imagine learning that a faulty vaccine has caused Rebecca Smith, an adorable eight-year-old, to get extremely sick. If you watch her suffering and listen to her and her family, the empathy will flow, and you’ll want to act. But suppose…

1.) Respond, in your own words, and referencing your own experiences, to the validity of Gay’s question: “What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another?”  Gay references this particular quote to display how certain content moments might also harbor a sense of sorrow. To illustrate, if an individual is transitioning from high school to college, there could be joy in that instance of fostering one’s own self-actualization and self-sufficiency in college, but there could also be sorrow in leaving their home world behind. There can be a sense of familiarity and belonging in one’s home world, which is why it may be anxiety-provoking to abandon everything and…