

I believe truly having no empathy would make it impossible to form anything other than surface level friendships.
The only precious resource I own is my time, and who I spend it with. The thing in life that makes the hard times seem not so bad, and the good times twice as good, is spending with people I care about, and people that I know care about me.
To be pathological about it… My asking questions about you IS a means to an end. It gives a few useful things:
- I learn about you
- I learn about your worldview, I learn what motivates you
- and I learn where you tend to sell yourself short so I know how to encourage you
Talking about yourself is “giving” when only you share vulnerability. 1 word answers is keeping your guard up. Asking about them is “giving” because you get opportunities to learn about/support/uplift them. People like getting questions. It can make them feel cared for.
And I’m not saying anything is wrong with you. Just sharing my perspective.
And I’m a guy, so I guess you’d really be puzzled if we met IRL!
The technical term for this is called a
collective noun
in English. I did some quick googling, which unfortunately returned a ton of AI slop that I won’t repost here. But it did return tons of answers.My thought is, your school probably did teach you it was called a Whisper, but who’s to say what’s the authority on collective nouns.