Today’s episode examines how intense emotional sensitivity and hyper-empathy—particularly that experienced by autistic individuals—is systematically exploited and extracted as unpaid labor by societal institutions. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that hyper-empathy is frequently mislabeled as a personal flaw or instinct when it is, in fact, a resource consumed by families, care professions, and empires, fitting into a long history of coerced relational labour assigned to marginalised groups. Dr. Hoerricks directly challenges the narrative of the “autism empathy deficit,” stating that many autistic people experience overwhelming emotional attunement which is then utilised in exhausting “empathy pipelines” where their survival strategies are mistaken for natural availability. This dynamic transforms sensitivity from a personal capacity into an obligation that maintains the comfort of others, with the cost being borne solely by the deeply feeling individual. To counter this extraction, she advocates for reclaiming empathy as a specialised, boundary-protected skill and for the fundamental redistribution of emotional labor into a collective, reciprocal practice.

Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/the-empathy-that-built-the-world

Let me know what you think.

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