Buddha isn't simply urging kindness here—he's proposing that our sense of being fundamentally alone is the root of all our troubles, and that compassion is the antidote precisely because it dissolves that illusion of separateness. When a parent sits with a grieving friend and feels their pain as their own, something shifts: the friend no longer suffers quite so bitterly because they've been reminded they aren't isolated in it. What makes this radically different from generic "be nice" advice is that it names isolation itself as the disease, not mere unkindness as the symptom—we suffer not just from cruelty but from the desperate loneliness of believing ourselves cut off from one another.