Empathy and the Art of Living
Krznaric writes about empathy as a civic virtue rather than a psychological faculty — as a practice that changes how societies treat strangers, how institutions design services, and how workplaces organise.
This early essay (later developed into his books on empathy) is one of the cleanest arguments that empathy is something we cultivate, not something we either have or don't.
For product direction it is a useful philosophical grounding: user research is one of the institutions through which modern organisations practise, or fail to practise, empathy with the people they serve.
Read alongside Young's Practical Empathy for the operational complement. Krznaric's register is essayistic and deliberate.
Central argument
Krznaric argues that empathy is a civic virtue — a cultivable social practice rather than an innate psychological trait — and that its presence or absence shapes how institutions, workplaces, and societies relate to people outside their immediate circle. The central thesis is that empathy must be actively developed through habit and encounter, not merely expressed when naturally felt; this reframes it as an ethical and political commitment rather than a personality disposition. The essay positions empathy alongside classical civic virtues, giving it a philosophical weight that psychological treatments typically avoid.
Critique
The essay's main vulnerability is the gap between its philosophical ambition and its institutional specificity: arguing that empathy is a civic virtue cultivated through practice does not, on its own, tell us much about what conditions enable or suppress that cultivation in concrete organisations. Krznaric's essayistic register is deliberate and persuasive, but it can obscure the structural factors — power asymmetries, incentive systems, time pressure — that make empathy difficult to practise even when people are philosophically committed to it. A reader sympathetic to the argument might still leave without a clear account of why institutions that intend to be empathic so frequently fail.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, the essay's most pointed implication is that user research is not a neutral data-gathering mechanism but an institutional expression of whether an organisation has chosen to cultivate empathy as a practice — which means its quality is a leadership and structural question, not just a methodological one. If empathy is something practised rather than possessed, then a discovery process that is underfunded, siloed, or disconnected from decision-making is not a partial empathy effort; it is the organisation failing to practise it at all. This reframes common resourcing and prioritisation debates around research into something closer to an ethical and strategic commitment.