How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

by Elif Shafak

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.

The moment we stop listening to diverse opinions is also when we stop learning.

And repetition, however familiar and comforting, will never challenge us mentally, emotionally or behaviourally.

Today, social media and digital communication have both accelerated and heightened group narcissism. Stuck in our whispering galleries we have become bad listeners and even worse learners. Whether

In badly fractured societies that have lost their appreciation of diversity and their regard for pluralism, opponents will be seen as enemies, politics will become replete with martial metaphors and anyone who thinks and speaks differently will be labelled as a ‘traitor’.

Groups and tribes, just like communities and nations, in as much as they exist, should be imagined as complex, heterogeneous, diversified and fluid entities that continually evolve, change and adapt.

Sometimes, where you genetically or ethnically seem to fit in most is where you least belong.

And despite what our politicians have been telling us of late, I would like to think of myself as a citizen of the world, a citizen of this planet, a global soul. I have multiple belongings.

Multiple belongings are nurtured by cultural encounters but they are not only the preserve of people who travel. It is an attitude, a way of thinking, rather than the number of stamps on your passport. It is about thinking of yourself, and your fellow human beings, in more fluid terms than solid categories.

But acknowledging the dark side of emotions is only where we begin. It cannot be where we end up.

Reading the memoirs of people who have survived the darkest chapters in human history, such as the Holocaust, genocides, civil wars, is an important learning experience.

Discrimination always starts with words. It starts with language.

Too busy with our own lives to care about others. Uninterested in and unmoved by someone else’s pain. That is the most dangerous emotion – the lack of emotion.

One of the greatest paradoxes of our times is that hardliners are more passionate, engaged and involved than many moderates.

Here is one of our main challenges: How do we simultaneously remain engaged and manage to remain sane?

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.

Now we are universally aware that history can go backwards, that progress is neither guaranteed nor steady.

We all need to be more engaged, more involved citizens wherever we might happen to be in the world.

As a novelist, I believe in the transformative power of stories to bring people together, expand our cognitive horizons, and gently unlock our true potential for empathy and wisdom.

Until we open our ears to the vast, the endless, the multiple belongings and multiple stories the world has for us, we will find only a false version of sanity, a hall of mirrors that reflects ourselves but never offers us a way out. Do not be afraid of complexity. Be afraid of people who promise an easy shortcut to simplicity.