Distancing Ourselves from Love

In almost every aspect of life we are creating distance.  It's a disturbingly seamless progression.  The pendulum of modern convenience has swung wide.

• Processed foods are only food in the sense that we eat it.
• Online communication is not a substitute for company.
• We have more gadgets imaginable for containing babies.
• Children's lives are structured, scheduled from dawn to dusk.
• Many of us do not or cannot eat family meals.
• Together time is watching TV.

Play on Words: Empathic vs. Empathetic

I found this article from The Grammarist to be very interesting:

"Empathic is a variant of empathetic, which means characterized by empathy. Some American dictionaries list empathic as the standard word and empathetic as the variant, and the shorter word is older than the longer one. But empathetic has prevailed—probably due to analogy with sympathetic—and is now about five times as common as empathic in news publications from throughout the English-speaking world."