y'know how they say we lack empathy?

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I feel empathy for a completely immaterial thing. It's weird and irrational.



I can't stand to have it as my avatar. I feel like I'm a slave owner telling it to dance constantly and non-stop.

I feel sad for it.

Well, "they" do also say that we anthropomorphize inanimate objects. (I have to admit that I am and have been guilty of that one. It's often said that we prefer objects to people, but I think - at least in my case - that that extends all the way to feeling more empathy for objects to which I assign a personality than I feel for people who've already got one of their own.)

One of the saddest things I've ever seen was when I helped out in an invertebrate zoology laboratory during my undergraduate years. To show the students the movement of a Daphnia's legs and how it creates tiny water currents for locomotion, we touched a needle to glycerol and then to the Daphnia, which "stuck it" to the needle (it was not strong enough to break its adherence to the glycerol). Then, carmine red was put into the water so that students could see the dye particles moving past the organism's appendages.

It was so sad to me to watch the little Daphnia swimming and swimming for its life and going nowhere - who knows? probably not even realizing that it wasn't going anywhere. We were supposed to dispose of it at the end, but I shook it off the glycerol and put it back into the tank. I hope it survived.

I know that's not exactly inanimate, but neither is it actually anthropomorphic, so maybe this story is somewhat related.

I don't feel emotions for inanimate objects, but I do feel intense emotions about abstract ideas.

As a child I used to feel emotions for inanimate objects. Not anymore though, I matured in that aspect.