Why is it that I cannot empathise with others or understand their rationality?

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You could just be young.

The brain takes some time to fully develop. It is likely there are sex differences, I’ve seen it observed that men do not fully develop emotionally until their early-to-mid thirties. Women sometime in their twenties. An emotionally-undeveloped person is essentially “living in the hall of mirrors of the self.”

Most people I get into deep discussion with this about describe a process of slow, painstaking coming-to-awareness of the fact that they are the source of the poor relationships they have with others.

The brain can be pictured as a sandwich. The top part of the sandwich is our thinking, cognitive mind. The bottom part is our survival brain. In between is our emotional center. At the very center of the emotional center are the amygdalae, peanut-sized chunks of brain matter through which most brain activity passes through on the way to the cognitive mind.

The amygdala has a direct connection to the musculature of the face, through the facial nerve. Facial expressions are the primary vehicle by which empathy, or the sharing of emotional state with others. Note that this is a one-way pathway, your emotions will be expressed through your face, but it can’t directly perceive others faces. The amygdala can only receive empathy information as coming from the senses. Seeing others’ faces, and hearing their tone of voice.

The brain still develops well into adulthood. Part of that development involves learning how to regulate the amygdalae. They can override conscious, thinking-mind thought processes. Any time you see someone getting irrational, you are seeing amygdalae shutdown. The person is completely cut off from the normal empathic awareness of others’ emotions. It’s only after the blow-up that the person can then go back and work out what happened, making the conscious, rational mind aware of what the emotional brain is doing.

When the rational mind becomes aware of a particular pattern of irrationality, it can work to change itself so it can have better reactions. This communication between the emotional and rational mind is called self-awareness.

It seems we are all doomed to this process of slowly coming to the awareness that we are mired in self, until that very miring shows itself to us by blowing up our interactions with others.