Genuine question. When you study ancient civilizations whose entire history was built on genocide and slavery. And slavery was kinda progressive, because less developed civilizations couldn't afford managing slaves, so they put everyone to the sword. Medieval plagues that killed millions. World wars, where one German city lost 25k of civilians over a couple of days. And this was done by the good guys, don't make me mention what the bad guys did.
I remember being very emotional when I was like 17 and realized that all my childish understanding of Roman history with nice cool legionaries, roads and chariot racing was a whitewashed piece of junk.
Did it ever make you less sympathetic? Cuz this is how I feel. Can you relate to that?
First, a couple of similar questions with good answers:
u/Kochevnik81 has an answer to a similar question here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sk9n9g/how_do_you_deal_with_the_tolls_of_studying/
has another answer here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qxyx8f/historians_does_learning_about_history_ever_make/
Both answers touch on a couple of important points: There's a filter on what history you're exposed to. Do you think the average person wants to read about art history, or about technological innovations in the plow? Probably not! There's a strong focus in pop history on the big things. The big wars, the big epidemics, the big inventions. Who cares about improvements to agricultural yield when there's spaceships and trebuchets to read about! But you know from your own life that there's more to life than those things. In fact most of your life is not those things. Hopefully most of your life is relatively uneventful. And uneventful makes for boring reading for most people. People reading about the last century years from now won't want to read about people going to work, having happy hours, trying to get their hands on the lastest game consoles, etc. etc. They'll want to read about wars and spaceships. Will those books tell them all that much about you? But read a popular book or watch a popular youtuber and you'd be hard-pressed to see that side of history.
Another point I want to make I'll start with a quote from Marc van de Mieroop: "The past has been described as a foreign country, and to study it is like traveling: we meet people who are much like us, but also distinctly different....As visitors to a foreign country, we do not comprehend all we see, because we are not full participants in the lives and cultures we encounter."
I'd say "foreign country" is almost understating it in some cases. Another element of pop history - in an attempt to make the past more digestible and relatable there's a tendency to...well, try to make it more relatable than it really was. Yes, people for all of recorded history have been anatomically, behaviorally modern humans just like us. They may have told jokes, played with dogs, drank beer, etc. But the culture and societies they were raised and lived in are different to ours in ways that are often hard to fathom, and those differences profoundly affect the way they saw the world and their fellow people. And these differences can arise rapidly - just look at the friction between older and younger generations living today.
I'm not saying you should "well it was a different time..." everything everyone did prior to some point in history (which is probably dangerous in its own way), but to go back to your question it IS hard to empathize (using that word instead of sympathize) with many people in the past. It just is, because they, and the entire context of their lives, were so different. One suggestion, and it's a hard one because, again, it's not the most popular subject, is instead of reading about things people did (e.g. military history) try finding books about the way people were. Social and cultural history, I guess you'd call it?