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I don't like when people treat empathy as an all-or-nothing, or when they say that not having empathy makes you a bad person. I am capable of empathizing with people, but only when they think the same way I do, which means I hardly have empathy at all. For example, if something makes someone upset, I can understand their thoughts/feelings if the same thing would make me upset. Otherwise, it's like I'm looking at an alien creature. It's why I've never understood why people get offended at jokes when they know that they're jokes, or why people don't find communism as upsetting as racism, and so on. And on the rare occasion I do think I've modeled someone mentally, I usually end up being wrong.
What would you call this phenomenon? Limited empathy?
I would say that just about everyone has limited empathy, otherwise we'd all be effective altruists spending our life savings on bed nets in Africa. The point of ethics is more or less to tell us how we should allocate our supply of empathy among various spheres of concern, with a common approach being that in most circumstances we should care less about people increasingly distant from us, but that we should make some efforts towards generalized (in the form of charitable donations, tithes, zakat, etc.) or situational (if we see someone drowning in front of us) concern for strangers.
As we each differ in our native capacities, the best results for society will come from people with too much empathy restraining themselves and not letting homeless strangers sleep in their beds, while people with too little empathy try to sometimes assist or comfort people in obvious distress. It's quite common that a friend or family member will complain to me about something I don't think is a big deal, but I'd be a bad friend or relative if I told them what I really thought.
We all go through life slightly misaligned with the world around us, and the allure of the internet is in part from our ability to find people who think exactly like we do, without all the social frictions of real-life interactions. But unless enough of us decide to start a commune somewhere, we're better off learning how to deal with being a squeaky wheel rather than dreaming about grease.
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