How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

by Elif Shafak

‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you’,

when you feel alone don’t look within, look out and look beyond for others who feel the same way, for there are always others, and if you can connect with them and with their story, you will be able to see everything in a new light.

More and more it feels that, when it comes to digital technologies, all the decisions are taken without us and despite us.

We are confused – but confusion has now become a way of life.

We are exhausted by anxiety, consumed with anger, our minds and defences all too often overwhelmed.

According to Fromm, collective narcissism at times cloaked itself in nationalism.

At other times, it camouflaged as religious narcissism, when believers doggedly held the conviction that members of their faith were dearer to God and far more deserving of paradise and more virtuous than others simply by being born into it.

‘the individual satisfies his

own narcissism by belonging to and identifying himself with the group. Not he the nobody is great, but he the member of the most wonderful group on earth.’

Stuck in our whispering galleries we have become bad listeners and even worse learners.

‘I am from multiple places,’ I wanted to be able to say in return. ‘I come from many cities and cultures, plural and diverse, but I am also from the ruins and remnants of these, from the memories and forgettings, from the stories and silences.’

Sometimes, where you genetically or ethnically seem to fit in most is where you least belong. Sometimes you are at your loneliest among people who physically resemble you and seem to speak the same language.

How we define our identity will shape our next steps.

Motherlands are castles made of glass. In order to leave them, you have to break something – a wall, a social convention, a cultural norm, a psychological barrier, a heart. What you have broken will haunt you.

The motherlands we have walked out on resemble the oaths we have taken as children. We might not believe in them any more, we might not even think about them much, but they still tie our tongues. They are the secrets withheld, answers swallowed, hurts unspoken, old wounds opened fresh, first loves unforgotten. Adamant though we may be to abandon our motherlands, because God knows we have had enough of them, enough of their stupidities and absurdities and hostilities and cruelties, the truth is they will never abandon us.

New immigration changes

would like to think of myself as a citizen of the world, a citizen of this planet, a global soul.

‘You focus on improving your daughter’s life. We inherit our circumstances, we improve them for the next generation. I had little education, I wanted you to do better. Now you need to make sure your daughter has more than you had. Isn’t this the natural way of the world?’

One of the greatest paradoxes of our times is that hardliners are more passionate, engaged and involved than many moderates. When we do not engage in civic discourse and public space, we become increasingly isolated and disconnected, thereby breeding apathy.

We live in an age in which there is too much information, less knowledge and even less wisdom.

Knowledge requires reading. Books. In-depth analyses. Investigative journalism. Then there is wisdom, which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy. For that we need stories and storytelling.

Too much optimism generated complacency and ignorance and an illusion of perpetual progress. It also led to the assumption that human rights, women’s rights, minority rights and freedom of speech were values that other people in other lands had to worry about and fight for, but not the citizens of the democratic Western world, since they were beyond such passé concerns. These were stable and solid democracies, after all. The battles had been won.