Breaking the Mold: Masculinity, Mentorship & Future Men

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1:01Hello and welcome back to To Be A Boy with me Jolie Braley. Me Elliot Ray. We really would love you to click subscribe. I know we keep saying that but it really does help us. Maybe a little like as well just to show that you're giving us a good thumbs up. You know it just makes us feel good. Thank you very much. From rising mental health struggles and record rates of male suicide, to the challenges faced in education and health. The landscape for men and boys is rapidly shifting and support along the way has often been limited. Just the idea that men and boys need support can sometimes be met with hesitation and pushback.

1:41It's essential that we engage boys and men in conversations around positive masculinity, conversations that ensure our sons, brothers, friends and colleagues can live happy and healthy lives and contribute positively to their families and communities. Today we are joined by Owen Thomas and Chris Stein from Future Men. Founded in 1988, Future Men is a multi-award winning specialist charity that supports boys and men along the path to becoming dynamic future men while addressing the stereotypes around masculinity and engaging in the wider conversation about what it means to be a man. Future men support boys and men from childhood to 25 plus to help them improve their mental health and well-being and guide them to become dynamic and future healthy men.

2:31Welcome, Chris and Owen, to the podcast. Great to have you. Nice to see you. Yeah, thank you, Elliot. And congratulations both to you and Jolie on your MBEs. Very, very well deserved. And, you know, we really support all the work you guys are doing. Lovely. Thanks so much, Chris. I appreciate that. Let's get straight in. Let's get straight in. So the conversation around men and boys has never been so divisive, controversial, amplified and platformed. And as people have been doing this work for many years, we are really interested in your thoughts about how do you see the conversation evolving?

3:09What are your reflections on how the conversation around the plight of men and boys has evolved in recent years? I'll do the sort of maybe the headline stuff. And I think, first of all, the idea of plight, I think that's an interesting framing, because we do still live in the UK, and probably more globally as well. but I want to be clear that we're speaking about the UK situation in a patriarchy and one where misogyny is rife at very many levels from from banter all the way up to serious violence. But equally, the conversation around boys and men more generally often skews to the most violent and the most successful.

3:56But for the vast majority of boys and men, that might not reflect their lived experience whatsoever. And so I think that that framing is not inclusive and it can create some division because of its lack of inclusivity. I would add from our perspectives of Future Men, our target cohort of men and boys, whilst we really, really are keen to spread our reach as wide as possible and contribute to the wider conversation in society around the role of men and boys, I think our focus, our articles focus on more marginalized men and boys. So people who are maybe more on the fringes of society, who don't have the agency or the personal skill set, education or opportunity to maybe reflect within their own mind on who they're being and how they're being and who they want to be.

4:48I think the narrative very much is framed, as Chris has kind of alluded to, in the deficits that we see within men. So a lot of the discussion at the moment around men and boys is around the problems that they are opposing society. and the challenges that poses to our ideals of how we want society to be as we move forward. I think your introduction was really on point when you said, how do we help men live happy, healthy lives where they contribute to wider society? I think that's all we want. I think the models of masculinity that have been shared with many of us for so many years are not conducive with that.

5:24They're conducive with a patriarchal model that says it's a hierarchical system. men are at the top white affluent men normally at the top of that system they draw the benefits out of that and below that there are various kind of levels that we can occupy in this devilish pyramid of life to try and get where we're going and most men don't benefit from it um most men in who are not kind of causing lots of problems to the rest of society and themselves and their families but also don't benefit from being in charge of the way the world works or drawing off a lot of financial reward from that find themselves in the middle a bit confused about where to go stuck within the frameworks that don't meet their needs their children's needs their partner's needs um and are often struggling to find ways to be satisfied and fulfilled with all of the pressures and ideas about how you're supposed to be so the narrative is you're absolutely right more visible than it's ever been but i don't think it's the healthiest it's ever been It's quite adversarial at the moment.

6:27And at the time of kind of shrinking resources, rising prices, some people who are very, very loudly shouting about what models of masculinity they think we should adhere to, including the current leader of the free world. You know, it's a really challenging time, you know, and no one tells you more clearly and more upfrontly about what it is to be a man than a young boy who quotes Donald Trump and says, but hold on, he says that's how he should be that's how look he just got voted in clearly you know i can't be wrong in espousing some of these views so i think um we just want to be part of a conversation it's not for us to dictate to men and boys about how they should be it's for us to build a relationship so we can have a healthy challenge and present them with options to consider themselves um and then be available afterwards when they've had time to consider to say right now you've considered it now you're more open to the idea of help um let's make sure we've got mechanisms to help yeah let's let's talk about that what you're saying there around what young boys tell you because you know one of the reasons we want to get you on the podcast is because your organization does work with boys on on the ground you're you're in schools you're in communities talking to boys and sometimes this conversation can be had about boys but not actually with their voices included so what would you say are the most pressing and poignant issues that you're hearing from boys on a day-to-day basis uh some while back I uh conducted a series of focus groups with um representation from each of our strands of work so uh we work in schools we work with fathers and we work in the community and um I used a tool which was a series of kind of words and prompts and then a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree.

8:20So then they could talk to the tool and not about themselves. This was about trying to foster an environment where it was broader than the individual. And some really key ideas came out, maybe surprising and maybe not surprising, depending upon your perspective. But the younger boys held more traditional views of masculinity. There was more of an aspiration towards an archetype and a norm than there was for the fathers, for example. And the fathers were generally in the kind of late 20s to mid 30s range. And they were saying by this point, a lot of those kind of ideas of what type of trainers to wear or how to how to flex in society, they were gone.

9:09They just didn't. It wasn't a big issue for them. Um, uh, masculinity was framed very much in terms of religion. Uh, so there, there are a number of, uh, young people that we support in the community, uh, particularly around Westminster and North Kensington that come from, uh, more sort of North African backgrounds. And this was a big influence on them in terms of their, their, their ideas and normative, um, behaviors towards masculinity. I've mentioned age, culture as well We support, as Owen said Young people, young men Men from lots of different cultures But often more marginalized backgrounds And those sort of cultural factors Played a role, again, in their view of masculinity So there were all these different ways of understanding masculinity Which was important to confirm That masculinity is not one thing and it's not existent in, it has normative functions, normative behaviors, normative thought processes, but equally that's interpreted through a prism that sort of parses out what we do and what we say.

10:26In terms of the actual challenges that are faced educationally, boys are not doing particularly well. For something like 33 years, boys have underperformed at GCSE level. And of course, there's lots of cutting of that. So it's not all boys. It's some boys in some circumstances. And at certain ages. And at certain ages, yeah. We've seen, for example, ethnic minority Afro-Cubrian boys do really well at primary school. And then there's something that switches in the transition to secondary school with the onset of adolescence and different expectations around what we want from our teenage boys and what their peers expect from them and what society expects from them, depending on where they grow up and what their socio-economic or cultural background may be, you see this divergence and this change in terms of outcomes, opportunities and behaviours.

11:19And also in the way they're viewed by society as well, which has an influence on this expectation shapes how you behave. You live up to an expectation. If it's very low and very negative, we can't be surprised sometimes that boys that we frame in that light start fitting the mould. You know, it's difficult to break the mould. That's why we say, well, he's breaking the mould. We make a big deal out of it, you know, but actually we sit back and go, why isn't everybody breaking the mould? He's done it. Because he's not been given the inputs to allow him to do so. So sorry to jump in there, but I just think it's really important to realise that it's not a continuum.

11:55There are opportunities for boys and men when they're really flexible, when they're getting lots of new ideas compared to what my childhood in the 70s and 80s and what I've been like and what my oldest child, who's not a boy, by the way, who's a girl, but her compatriots and her peers and her cousins who grew up in the 90s were having was a very different environment, you know. But now there is a lot of information. There's a lot of people actively kind of almost pressing you into different camps. And modern life is all about camps, right? Whether it's online, whether it's about your, whether you're a goth or you're a grime or a drill, whatever it is your social grouping is, there's less scope, I feel like, for boys and men to move around these different groups, learn new experience and learn new tools to help them get through life.

12:40They can be very rigidly locked into one pathway, even more so now than before. And you would have thought, that's not possible. You've got the world at your fingertips. But what it does is, and the devil in the room being social media, is it allows you to just follow the path of least resistance. And then the algorithms say, well, I've started looking at things that are a bit dramatic in this area, I'll just feed more of the same content to you. So there isn't a challenge. So our services are based around not only asking the guys what they think, young men, boys, young adults, which is really important as well because the traditional ages at which we went through different rites of passage is changing.

13:22What do they say? 40s are new 30, 50s are new 40. So that has a knock-on effect all the way back, right down to your childhood where the frameworks we give boys to develop within. You know, the expectation 50, 100 years ago was very clear about what boys and men did in society. You either achieved academically and went on to these types of careers or these types of apprenticeships, or you didn't and you were out of school and you were working by the time you were 14. You might have been married and had a family by the time you were 16 or 17, but you also had status in society and in your community because you were doing all the things expected of you as a man.

13:56Since we've had all of the marvellous advancements in society since the 60s onwards with women's lib, the advance of reproductive protection technologies that have liberated women from being under the yoke of marriage and men, and we've got a society much more informed by choice the traditional roles that men had for a long time have got and we've not, we kind of sat back and went, alright, so how's life going to be now? What's society going to be like now? And we're leaving different groups of people behind while some of us are doing really well at this flexible new egalitarian lifestyle but for many men and boys they're not which is why we're seeing for us in our view the kind of growth of negative speak talk and ideas and groups that attach themselves to these kind of more toxic or more harmful models of masculinity that actually are not really satisfying for those men or fulfilling for them in the long term.

14:55Hey, Elliot here. As you may know, as well as co-hosting this lovely podcast, I also run Parenting Out Loud, the workplace culture change programme that supports dads to be loud and proud about their caring responsibilities at work and equal parents at home. Well, I have some exciting news. In September, we are hosting the UK's first ever Working Dads Summit. Sponsored by Universal Music Group UK, the one-day online event will bring together fathers, thought leaders, employers and change makers to explore what it really means to be a dad in today's world and how we can create workplace environments where dads can parent loudly.

15:35Expect real stories, bold conversations and practical solutions. So whether you are a dad, an employer, HR leader or dadvocate, this summit is for anyone who believes in equal parenting and gender equality at work and at home. 23rd of September, online, 1pm to 5pm, completely free. So register on workingdadssummit.com and join the community over on LinkedIn. Just search for Parenting Out Loud. Right, back to the show. There was a poll done earlier this week which found that just under half of boys and young men think that feminism has gone too far and that they themselves have experienced sexism.

16:20This came out on the radio on Monday and I was in the kitchen with my 11-year-old son and he heard it and he said to me, I would agree with that. And I said, all right, well, tell me a bit more, what do you mean? And he said, well, at school, all of the girls are constantly crying sexism over everything they call everything sexist and it feels very much to me like the teachers constantly take their side over the side of boys would you this is a very controversial question would do you think that the way we've had the conversation about women's rights has potentially caused negative side effects in terms of men feeling completely ignored from the conversation and therefore pushing back?

17:05Or do you think it's just that we've focused a lot on women, as you've said, women and girls, but we haven't really had that conversation enough at all about boys and men? The first thing I would want to say is that the advancement of women and feminism is to be felicited. And it's actually a model that should be deconstructed, decomposed and analysed from the perspective of masculinity boys and men to see what of what aspects of that discussion can be brought forward um and and implemented in in a way that resonates for boys and men i mean i would add it's really interesting and i'll make this i suppose more linked to experience of delivering what i've heard boys and young men saying um you know first and foremost it's about definitions what does feminism mean does everyone understand what the term feminism means because i've had conversations with feminists in different settings over the over the years i've been doing this work and i've been here about 20 years and you can get different views on what feminism is you know there isn't one uniform voice of feminism within the feminist movement you know there are disputes about you know what feminism means for women of color versus a middle-class white woman talking about feminism and the dynamics of power and how that plays out are really what we're talking about here i think i mean number one i'm interested to hear how you manage that conversation with your son if that comes up now because it can't be easy but i think that you know young men are not going to make this stuff up he's speaking based upon his experiences and what he's observed right so maybe there's something around his frame of reference where he needs to understand or maybe be brought up to speed about the long struggle for equality which is still ongoing and that feminism in my view means i just believe in equality amongst the sexes that doesn't mean um that everyone is the same all of the time doing everything equality of outcome is what we're looking for for everyone equality of that doesn't mean necessarily that to get to that end point we all do exactly the same things so men have to cede some of that space they have to cede some of that power and they have to cede some of that control you know and in issues of fairness how things are distributed you have to start talking about the advantages that some of us start our life with or the privilege that some of us start our life with and they're a slight in scale than this you know in some settings chris is more privileged than i do in some chris and i and elliot have more than you do jolly um and vice versa but but really the point i made about this feeling of disenfranchisement the work we do with marginalized boys many of them have no agency over their own lives you know they grow in a household where all of the significant adults in the lives of women because maybe their dad's not at home they've got a mom they've got a nan and an aunt or most of the teachers at school are women um you know all of the powerful people they might have a social worker often as a woman you know so they don't and and they feel like none of you understand me but you're telling me how i need to be and what kind of person i should be you know none of you care about my experience and actually when i look at the world everything seems quite adversarial so what camp am i in if we don't make the idea of you know you can be a man you can be heterosexual you can be traditional in your views but you can still be empathetic you can still believe that women shouldn't be controlled by men etc etc etc it's a complicated nuanced conversation and we have to create space for everyone to be able to have that PSHE frameworks don't work at the moment for that that's powerful Owen I think so much of what you said is so true and resonates deeply with me as well a couple of things you mentioned young boys having a staunch idea about masculinity without maybe the experience and I've definitely seen that in my work and what you were saying there in regards to power and class and race and how that intersects with this conversation I want to kind of ask you about your work you work in London quite a lot with lots of different communities with a lot of the issues that you're seeing boys speaking about how do you think that differs based on their race their class and other characteristics as well i mean look there's a sliding scale right there are many in there's a concept of intersectionality i'm sure everyone here is familiar with it um it's developed talked i think it was ann phoenix coming up with this idea to talk about all the different factors and different contributing issues that create the environment that makes your world your world And so for boys and young men, these intersecting factors of race, culture, poverty, socioeconomic class, access to opportunities, all contribute towards you, A, being more or less likely to, as Chris kind of referred to at the beginning, achieve education academically, which opens up your opportunities in life moving forward.

21:56So that measure, that metric for men of achieving, providing still exists. And if you don't have clear pathways because you are less likely, you have less opportunity, you're a working class white British guy from a struggling sink estate on either inner city or on one of the dormitory boroughs on the outskirts of London. There's not a lot of opportunity for you there. There's not a lot of work, secure work. you know you've not achieved educationally in school academically the way you would want to you don't have access to lots of social networks that can get you into work and that can develop you so you're going to kind of make the most of the opportunities that are laid before you and to keep yourself safe from people in your own area from this idea that if you're different you're an outlier and you're a problem you might adopt ideas and present in ways that are not actually true to yourself or true to your beliefs because it actually can be risky to break out of what the traditional mold should be you know and that is compounded sometimes by race and by culture i can't see a pathway for many of the young men we work with when we're saying stay in school get your education get a job why i can never afford a home in london how am i about as a single man on the kind of jobs i can get look where i live houses are like nearly a million pounds for two bedroom flat what's what am i going to do so there's a degree of hopelessness where there's this sense that they sometimes think I'm going to give up you know people not interested in people my voice people like me and I heard this from a boy in school as well which was really disheartening people like me we hustle we do road that's what we do and it was really disheartening for me it was growing you know in a what would be deemed a black part of London inner city London one of the centers of black culture I'm a South London Lamb's British the boy originally so you know we had riots to protest and to gather collectively to try and bring about change doesn't exist in the same way they feel disempowered so they give up a little bit and fall to this lowest common denominator so money class race they're all problematic you if you've got a positive kind of support network around any of those things you can break that ceiling you can be the outlier that we spoke about earlier on that we want everyone to be but we have to understand and accept that that is unusual that's some you know it's less likely statistically that you're going to go on and achieve a career in the city or go on to become a great academic or an engineer if you come from a sink estate and go to a state school in inner london if you're black if you've got a name a surname that sounds funny when you write it down on a job application to an employer you're less likely to even get an interview that's still statistically true so all of those factors to start to wear boys down.

24:42They become very aware of this very early on in their lives. And it can be problematic. You know, the last thing I'll say before I give to Chris is, you know, we have got a lot of love for boys in our society when they're small and cute. And they get to this point, Jolie, I don't know how old your son you were referring to earlier on, but given the questions he was asking, they get to this point where, you know, they start to emit smells. They become a bit surly. They wear their hood. They get a bit of bum fluff on their chin. And you walk down them past the road. and they're probably still the lovely little boys they were the year previously but they started to affect this outward persona to kind of protect themselves from this insecurity and from the real risk that other boys and young men or authorities it might be the police um it might be your head teacher in school are going to notice you and take advantage of you so the only way i know to shield myself from that is to present like i know everything that i'm confident and no one can mess with me.

25:36I want to, I mean, again, Owen is the most eloquent person you can ever meet, right? And he combines strong anecdote with strong statistical background. I just want to pick up, though, on, he really highlights this challenge of older men speaking to younger boys, older men who may have the status that is the result of educational attainment, job satisfaction career development uh house potentially family potentially and then trying to communicate to boys that oh you don't need to fulfill the dominant norms of masculinity oh it's fine for you to say you've already got all this stuff right so how it's it's a real challenge how do you say to somebody status is not as important as you think it is from people who already have it.

26:31It's a paradox. The other thing I wanted to pick up on is also that there is a really unseen privilege in this world, which is coming from a loving, caring family that can sit inside any type of norm around socioeconomic background. You could have loving parents who are not very well off, who are not necessarily very educated. But if they listen to you in a non-judgmental way, if they're curious about your world, if they're offering guidance as opposed to do this, if they're saying things like, it's very difficult for me to advise or guide you in this world because that's your world. I come from a different world.

27:17So let's think about what this looks like together. This is a massive privilege, if you want to use that term, that is unseen because we don't we don't cut intersectionality like that. Definitely agree. I want to go to talking about the engaging boys and how you do this. I remember very many years ago maybe I was 25 I was invited to speak to a group of year six boys in Edmonton quite a rough school in Edmonton and they were going off to year seven and so I was brought in to speak to these boys and they put three classes together there was about 60 kids and I remember walking in and they just sat there and just stared at me and were like impressed me and all they asked at the beginning was what car do you drive and what football team do you support and I had to work so hard to kind of get their respect so they listened to me and when I sold some stories and let them know that I'm not from their area but I have a similar had a similar life to them they kind of loosened up a little bit and two hours later we got somewhere but it was tricky and now the work I do with adults is so much easier because adults generally will give you that respect at the beginning so talk to us about tools and techniques there's so many parents that listen so many practitioners that listen to this podcast they'll be really interested to hear about how you open up kind of productive conversations about masculinity with young boys well i i'm going to i'm going to use the platform you've given me elliot to blow my own trumpet for a bit and uh to unveil my super talent.

28:48So I've been a body popper for 25 years. I've competed, I've traveled, I've done shows. And I want to be very clear, this is not general advice. Okay. This is not, this is not, I'm just highlighting case studies. Yeah. It's I'm highlighting a tool And I go to schools and I do with a colleague of mine and we do a show, an assembly, and we very clear to the school, do not introduce us. We're standing there, put the music on, we dance. Right. So that's that captivates them. After that, I tell them about a tricky moment in my life when my dad, when I was younger, he had a life changing stroke. And I talk about how life was very fuzzy for a couple of weeks.

29:38And then the things I did to move away from that and to build more safety and security and how it never it didn't change the actual circumstances I was facing with my brother and my mom. But it gave us more resource to to sort of carry on. And then we talk about the five ways to well-being and we do some some some some pre-work around support in the school. in their local community, and we signpost towards safe and secure online spaces. So this is a very quick, punchy way of grabbing attention, using that attention for discussions around vulnerability. Managing conflict is a key part of that work as well.

30:21Conflict arises all of the time, where it could be at home, about getting up and getting to school in the morning. Once you get to school, they teach you about lateness. you've got a peer you know you've got a group of girls that are taking the mickey out of the trainers you're wearing that day how do you manage that conflict how do you manage that feeling of insecurity and being got at and all the rest of it how do you build resilience so resilience doesn't mean i'm just going to put up with it this is my station i'm staying here we're saying be aspirational we want to help build this idea that i can achieve more but put in a scientific approach to build critical thinkers so that they work out how do I get from here to there whilst maintaining my well-being.

31:01We've participated with the Open University in this piece of research around male role models because there's a lot of talk at the moment about how important male role models are to boys and young men and we need to have positive people. And I think to Chris's point earlier on, sometimes young men find it hard to engage with role models because they're already successful, so in terms of famous people or sports people. whilst it's great to see yourself represented in imagery and in pop or in positions of power what i say is that we've got enough footballers and boxers and singers and rappers there's nothing wrong with that that's great but i say to the young people do you not notice we're overrepresented in those areas of work why is that and i look into the history of minstrelism and black people performing for people whatever to empower them not to say that you need to be radical and empty in society but tell me where you see the next black boeing pilot or lawyer or high court circuit judge or we're starting to see that movement in society now so you can draw on different models but the point is boys don't need a man who looks like them to tell them how to be a man it's useful it's one of the tools that helps them in their lives but what we seem to say to mothers who don't have a positive male role model in the household is that you can still raise a great boy who's empathetic, who's understanding, who is going to be happy within himself.

32:16If you present that parenting model that Chris kind of really loosely outlined there of being a caring, understanding, engaged, attached and involved parent, the challenges around kind of engaging boys is just around listening to them, showing them you care about their situation and the circumstances they're in, giving them the space and the time to get. We used to have, in one of our models, it's called venturing, which is a really cheap bastardization of the word mentoring with time to vent first you can't mentor someone who's not had a chance to express themselves and say what my issue is the boy said look if i'm in crisis i don't care i don't care if it's someone who's posh i don't care for someone who's poor black white man if they care about me and i know they're on my side that's enough if you're going to go and do it a generic engagement piece you might it might be quicker to break down barriers if you use a device like Chris does, you know, there's two dudes, they've started dancing, these middle-aged men, oh, they look quite frunky.

33:13I'll talk to these guys, you know. But if you don't have those skill sets up your sleeve, and I left that skill set probably when you started, more than 25 years ago, Chris, of course, blimey. But I'm not willing to go and dance in front of an assembly hall full of teenagers anymore. Those days are done for me. So I have to use conversation. I have to show an interest in them. They're human beings like everybody else. And you will find with men and boys, even though we are kind of conditioned to go, oh, yeah, I don't really chat. As your model of work, Elliot, through music, football, fatherhood kind of shows, if you find the right subjects to get men started talking about, we become quite effusive.

33:51Powerful. Well, I've just put a body popping class, starts tomorrow. 12 weeks, intense, of course. So, Chris, I'm available. I'm available.

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34:58We've spoken quite a lot about the conversation that is happening about men and boys. We're having the conversation, which is really, really good. and there is so much conversation about masculinity and the need for it to be redefined. Do you have a model, seven characteristics that contribute to positive masculinity? Talk to us a little bit about what those seven characteristics are and also what you think can be achieved through that model as well. So a recap of what the seven characteristics are. And we use a mnemonic device of memory aid called the NICERRRs. n for non-violence i for inclusiveness c for curiosity e for empathy and then the triple r's are resourcefulness resilience and reflectiveness you know what makes us unique and why i've been here so long and why i love this organization is that if we support kind of boys i mean at these transitional key moments in their lives these these teachable moments whether that's becoming a dad, leaving, moving from primary to secondary school, exploring your community, trying to make that natural breakaway from your parents.

36:07There's this moment where they're more susceptible, more open to the accepting help or seeking help, right? We have to utilise that moment. And so we've developed loads of different types of programmes over the years to engage boys and men at different, wherever you may find them in their lives. You know, we might have been doing a programme that looked at kind of the racial dynamics down in the state in South East London, near Thamesmead Elton, where there's been a long history, if you know Stephen Lawrence and Roland Adams, of racial disharmony and violence, right? And we were going down there to do a project with young white men who had been subject to racially aggravated kind of criminal charges.

36:44And our view was, you know, you don't just exclude these guys or leave it for the judicial system to work with them. Someone needs to sit down with these guys and explore why they found themselves in this situation. What really are your beliefs? Why do you feel what these differences? Actually, are there opportunities for us to bring young men from different communities together to show them what they've got in common, to build bridges between communities rather than just sit back and go, I don't like the views he espoused, so he shall forever be blotted from my landscape? No, you know, we have to have this kind of communal approach to want to solve problems.

37:15You're saying whatever kind of man you want to be, look at the context of where you live, the people you interact with, the agreed kind of norms across society, which end up as being laws and rules and social taboos. And try and find a way to fit within those because you'll live a happier, as you said at the beginning earlier, more fulfilled life. If you can put yourself in the position of other people rather than just feel sorry for them, you might change some of your behaviors because you can imagine what it'd be like for that to happen to you or someone you love. If you just feel sympathy, you can just dismiss people and go, oh yeah, it's terrible that happened to them, but hey, that's life.