Average cats of my acquaintance have been altogether less interested in how I was feeling. Perhaps we like to feel inadequate as well.

Mmm. Perhaps cats have evolved deliberately to target people with a different emotional makeup. We like to think that we choose our pets, but perhaps they've been choosing us! It's an interesting example of natural selection at work because we deliberately tinker with the gene pools of pet species, so things happen much faster than is usually the case...