The Glitch in the Empathy Machine: When Writing as Human Connection Becomes a Performance

It’s received wisdom, repeated in writing workshops and author interviews like a sacred mantra: the writer’s ultimate task is to build an empathy machine. The phrase, popularized by novelist Leslie Jamison, suggests that stories are engines designed to transport a reader into another consciousness, to forge a bond of understanding across the chasms of experience. It’s a beautiful idea, one that elevates our craft to a form of social and spiritual service. Lately, though, I’ve been hearing a different sound coming from this machine’s polished casing—not the hum of connection, but the whir of a mechanism performing its own function.

The problem isn’t with empathy itself, but with the way the metaphor of the "machine" encourages a kind of technical optimization. When the goal becomes the explicit *production* of empathy, the writer can slip from exploration into engineering. The subtle quirks of a character, the raw edges of a personal essay, risk being sanded down and repurposed as levers, calibrated precisely to elicit a predictable response. The messy, often contradictory nature of human experience is streamlined into a cog that will perfectly fit the reader’s emotional gearbox.

The Spectacle of Vulnerability

This is most evident in the economy of “vulnerability” that now dominates so much of non-fiction writing, particularly online. Vulnerability, when genuine, is a powerful catalyst for connection. But when it’s treated as a primary ingredient—a necessary component to be added to the recipe for audience engagement—it curdles into performance. We learn to curate our wounds, to frame our anxieties in narratively satisfying arcs, to offer up our pain not as a shared burden but as a product that promises authenticity. The writer ceases to be a person grappling with an experience and becomes a docent guiding a tour through their own past, pointing out the significant emotional landmarks with practiced precision.

In this transactional space, the reader is not so much a fellow traveler as a customer purchasing an emotional experience. The connection forged is fleeting, a hit of feeling rather than a deepening of understanding. The “empathy machine” has succeeded in its task, but it has produced a chimeric connection, one that leaves both writer and reader strangely empty. The writer feels the pressure to constantly generate new, more intense vulnerabilities, while the reader becomes inured, requiring ever-stronger stimuli to feel the same spark.

The core of the critique, then, is that an overemphasis on writing *as* an empathy machine can ironically erode the very thing it seeks to create: genuine human connection. True empathy isn’t a product to be manufactured and delivered; it’s a shared space that opens up unexpectedly when a writer is rigorously, even ruthlessly, honest—not just about their pain, but about their pettiness, their contradictions, their unedited thoughts. It’s found not in the grand, cathartic reveal, but in the quiet, unglamorous details that the writer didn’t think were important enough to manipulate.

Perhaps we need a different metaphor. Not a machine, with its connotations of efficiency and output, but something more akin to a shared window, smudged and imperfect, through which two people might briefly glimpse the same sliver of the world. The goal is not to build a flawless conduit of feeling, but to clean a single pane well enough that someone else can see through it, too. The connection happens not because the mechanism worked, but because for a moment, both were looking at the same thing, together.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: