Empathy is an interesting aspect of human nature that many people do not possess. Empathy in short is the ability to view an scenario from a different perspective than your own, normally to better understand someone's perspective on certain topics or ideas. This handy skill is a learned skill and when used effectively can be used to better understand humanity.
But as with every neat skill, they tend to have as many pros as they do cons. So i will attempt to explain the pros and cons that i have found apparent with empathy.
There are quite a few pros to empathy, one of which being in your reputation. A person who uses empathy often is normally seen as a loving compassionate person. Another pro that is quite noticeable is the ability to understand unexplained problems. On occasion if a problem really troubles someone or is very personal, most people will not tell anyone about it. But with empathy you can figure out what is troubling them sometimes with something as simple as "How have you been?". A more prominent pro of using empathy is better understanding how a person truly is. Most people wear a "Facade" in public or a metaphorical mask, these tend to hide their true personality from the public eye and conceal most things about them. Using empathy, you can work around the "Facade" and figure out how they truly are as a person, and most of the time appreciate them a bit more.
Empathy has allot of pros but also has its fair share of cons to go with it, a good example of one of its cons is a changed perspective. under most circumstances, use of empathy becomes a habit and changes your outlook on everyone around you. This is not really very terrible, but it can lead to you disliking a person more than would have normally. Another apparent con is over-assessing someone. This can happen when you use empathy on someone and spot something that would make you feel awful, but in truth does not faze them. Here is an example. You are talking with a person and figure out that they don't have a mother. To you that may seem horrible and you start pitying them, when in truth it may not even matter to them in the slightest. A more cumbersome problem with empathy lies with information. In order to understand or sympathize with someone you need to understand the problems they put up with. If you ask too many questions about their life, they may find you "Nosy" or "Annoying". On the contrary, if you do not inquire very much about them, you will not have any idea of their standpoint at all and cannot empathize with them. The last con i will cover is drama. It is very easy to get caught in some drama if you try to understand peoples problems, some of which may be very serious. Some people are not patient enough to deal with the newly acquired drama and can sometimes make the problem worse than it need to be.
This list most definitely did not cover every pro or con associated with empathy because they will differ from person to person however i did cover a few recurring pros and cons. whether you think empathy is worth your time and energy is up to you and your values in life and social interaction.