Empathy is praised to no end as a higher level of human emotion which allows for compassion and understanding. The idea of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes" in order to understand them is common advice and it's rare to find someone who disagrees with that notion.

Now empathy clearly motivates people, it clearly makes people feel things and develop new perspectives. We imagine what things might be like and if that encourages someone to be kinder or more open-minded then great. I am going to be talking only about why empathy is a poor tool for understanding others.

Main Reasons
1. Unknown differences b/w people

Differences in intelligence, upbringing, temperament, interpretations, values, appearance, social/family life, hobbies, personalities, psychological proclivities such as with stress and anxiety and so many other factors that can't be understood when you're trying to empathise with anyone but particularly strangers.

Even in seemingly unambiguous contexts, you have no idea how other people perceive things or what it makes them feel or think. You can understand sentiments but not people.

2. Removes people from their past

In scenarios like divorces, homelessness, being laid off, friends having arguments and so on. You can perhaps generally although probably inaccurately guess what people might be feeling in those situations but you can't understand exactly what has happened in the lead up to this scenario. The reasons for homelessness, for instance, are vast. I watched a very interesting youtube channel think called "invisible people" interviewing homeless people.

Some became homeless by choice, some were basically born into it, some are clearly not all there, some made terrible choices and some were just very unlucky. Some were very happy and others were miserable. I'm not saying we can take what they're saying at face value but you don't actually understand anything by just trying to "empathise" with a homeless person.

3. Empathy requires imagination

Pretty self-explanatory, you are filling in gaps by imagining things or guessing and this is obviously not an ideal way to achieve understanding. If you aren't imagining things or making assumptions then I don't think you can call what you're doing empathy. I don't mean empathy as in "being open-minded about what others might be experiencing" which is a very sensible alternative to empathy in my view.

4. Empathy is likely to be well received

So my problem here is that I know many people who think their attempts at empathy have been successful because the attempts are appreciated. There might be pragmatic reasons for accepting someone's attempt at empathy like receiving help from them in some way or to avoid offending them.

When someone tells you of their problems and you respond by trying to understand and trying to show concern, that's going to affect the feedback you get. Alternatively, you never meet the people you're empathising with and there's no chance to even be corrected. I know many who refuse to see empathy as a flawed tool for understanding because of such experiences or lack of bad experiences.

Conclusion

There are many alternatives to empathy but none of them promise the same kind of results because those results are unrealistic. People use empathy to justify positions on topics they know absolutely nothing about and talk like experts. I see this all the time when it comes to topics like politics, dating, law and philosophy.

You can't even take what people say at face value, let alone just imagining either what it would be like to be in their shoes or putting yourself in their shoes or just imagining anything of the sort I suppose.

I realise lots of different definitions for empathy exist and if you bring up one that is different from mine then don't assume we disagree. I am only talking about the definition as I've laid it out.