best of craigslist : I almost destroyed a life today
Aw man, this is a great story. And it didn’t even take the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future to knock some sense into this guy.
People usually have much better reasons for acting the way they do than we imagine them too. In psychology they call that (or something very much like that) the Fundamental Attribution Error. We think other people do what they do because that’s the kind of person they are. We think we are doing what we do because of the situation we’re in.
A first step toward empathy is trying to compensate for the F.A.E. and look at others’ behavior in terms of what situation they might be in which would prompt it.