Adding to your second paragraph, it also turns out that people who are healthy are more able to contribute to society, so even if you have zero empathy you’re going to want to provide for many of the basics that the US has increasingly striven to make unaffordable.
I guess calling it “social awareness” threw me off because to me that’s something completely different from what I’m saying.
It’s just basic economics (of countries whose economies are not based on resource extraction, which you can technically effectively do with a miserable and unhealthy populace).
Yeah, I just checked the definition of “social awareness” and I might have misused the expression, though I don’t quite know what would be the correct one to use to mean the awareness of how at multiple levels the lives of people around us can impact our own lives.
The problem a lot of times is that the social impact doesn’t get time to be addressed before it gets stopped in peoples minds. Many people get to “healthcare is expensive, I can’t/don’t want to pay someone else’s healthcare. Forget the economy or social benefit, I can’t afford to pay it.”
So the benefits are there, but when people are struggling it’s hard to ask them to see beyond their nose.
To me “social awareness” relates to how your actions impact the feelings of others, not so much the brutal math of the situation (which I would call Economics, which luckily happens to align with the empathetic angle in most countries).
I was using it to mean just the general improvement of the environment you live in, which does include monetary prosperity but also things like less Crime, things just being more well cared for and how generally being surrounded by people less stressed in a better mood makes one’s mood better.
Adding to your second paragraph, it also turns out that people who are healthy are more able to contribute to society, so even if you have zero empathy you’re going to want to provide for many of the basics that the US has increasingly striven to make unaffordable.
That would be part of the second rationale in the second paragraph, IMHO.
I guess calling it “social awareness” threw me off because to me that’s something completely different from what I’m saying.
It’s just basic economics (of countries whose economies are not based on resource extraction, which you can technically effectively do with a miserable and unhealthy populace).
Yeah, I just checked the definition of “social awareness” and I might have misused the expression, though I don’t quite know what would be the correct one to use to mean the awareness of how at multiple levels the lives of people around us can impact our own lives.
The problem a lot of times is that the social impact doesn’t get time to be addressed before it gets stopped in peoples minds. Many people get to “healthcare is expensive, I can’t/don’t want to pay someone else’s healthcare. Forget the economy or social benefit, I can’t afford to pay it.” So the benefits are there, but when people are struggling it’s hard to ask them to see beyond their nose.
To me “social awareness” relates to how your actions impact the feelings of others, not so much the brutal math of the situation (which I would call Economics, which luckily happens to align with the empathetic angle in most countries).
I was using it to mean just the general improvement of the environment you live in, which does include monetary prosperity but also things like less Crime, things just being more well cared for and how generally being surrounded by people less stressed in a better mood makes one’s mood better.