Nathan Payton

Dec 13th, 2023

Computers 10
USS Callister writes up.

The difference between sympathy and empathy is sympathy is trying to feel bad for someone who is
going through something bad. Empathy is understanding what someone is going through and putting
yourself in their shoes, you may have gone through the same thing. For example, if someone is having a
bad day, you would try to feel bad, but you don’t know what they are truly thinking. You won’t know if it
was a big deal, or just something minor that will pass.

I think the episode displayed the difference between the two well. It showed that you can feel bad for
someone who seems innocent and just lonely, but they are not what they seem, and you never know
what is truly going on with someone. The show tries to get us to feel bad but then it shows what he does
to people who treat him wrong in the game. When someone in his office treated him wrong, he took
their DNA and cloned them into the modded version of the game to torture them as versions of hat he
wanted them to look like. He attempted to make his own version of his favorite TV show and forced the
people he cloned to be a part of it.

I have some examples of sympathy and empathy. Like when Ethan broke up with his girlfriend, I felt bad,
but I don’t know if that was a good or bad thing. I just had to assume I understood what he went
through. An example of empathy would be when my cousin fell down the stairs. I understood what he
went through, and I put myself in his shoes when I fell down the stairs too trying to see if he was ok.