A Long, Cold, Deadly Journey

The basic idea: It's the fall of 1850 and Alice Marker has never felt more desperate. She is part of a wagon trail that was supposed to bring her family to a wonderful new life in the American West, but her husband succumbed to fever and died two weeks ago. Now, an early winter storm has refused to end, and for three unrelenting days the snow, wind and brutally cold temperatures have made her question whether she has the strength to keep her 10-month-old son alive. It is unclear how far they are from their destination, or whether any of them will survive. If she was alone, she would just lay down and die... but she cannot sentence her son to death. She cannot give up.

If I have done my job, you now have a bit of understanding what Alice experienced in October of 1850, as she wavered between giving up and fighting on. There was no one to save her, no easy or fast solution. She simply had to try and endure.

Your capacity to place yourself in Alice's position is called empathy. It is strongly associated with levels of oxytocin your body is producing, and in recent years our capacity to experience empathy has literally declined.

A bit more background: This past weekend, I heard author Martin Lindstrom speak at the annual meeting of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches program. He said, "One study from the University of Michigan conducted among 14,000 students over 30 years shows that there has been a drop in empathy of 48 percent over the last decade."

He then went on to say that while there are multiple reasons for this decline in empathy, one of them is that "social media is killing empathy."

Martin's new book, The Ministry of Common Sense, comes out this week and makes the case that empathy and common sense are linked. To shorthand his point of view quite a bit, the less empathy you feel, the less common sense you exhibit.

One path to fostering more empathy is to be more creative in your use of storytelling. Martin cited an example of his giving the board members of a pharmaceutical company drinking straws, asking them to hold their nose and breath through the straw.

Martin recalls, "After 30 seconds, half of the group spit up out the straw. One guy raised his hand and said this is absolutely ridiculous, no one can do this. I said: that's how every one of your patients feel every minute of their entire life."

From that moment on, the company changed. Spurred by the board, the organization became more empathetic.

I tell you this because it is your obligation as well as mine to foster more empathy in our society. The alternative is too horrible to even imagine.

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To illustrate my point, I made up Alice Marker, although many men, women and children perished in similar circumstances in the 1850s.

As for my headline, I used it to increase your odd of empathizing with Alice. But in addition, it describes what our society has been experiencing, and the urgency of restoring hope and empathy is just as pressing as my headline might suggest.

Bruce Kasanoff is the founder of The Journey, a newsletter that helps you focus your life on what matters most. He is a social media ghostwriter for leading entrepreneurs.