How to fall back in love with humanity

Why your mental health – and the world’s future – depends on compassion

Being a therapist is a pretty good cure for cynicism. The job lets you meet people from all backgrounds, with unimaginable stories, and to get to a place far deeper than their politics and opinions. You see people’s hearts, and you like what you see. But then you close up the therapy room, step out into the street, and the song freezes on your lips.

In my country, patriotic flags are starting to appear on lamp posts. Cities and towns are alive with protests and counter-protests, stoked by a dehumanising politics. Public life is becoming a theatre of alienation. I wish I could invite people to be a fly on the wall in therapy, to remember what they once loved about human beings.

What you discover as a therapist is that every human being is doing their best with awful wounds, inconsolable loneliness, and needs that will never be met. Nothing exempts any of us from this deep human truth: not riches, not race, not gender, not sex, not class, not age, and not nation. The business of being human is a lifetime’s work of meeting one another with grace, despite – and maybe because of – our individual suffering. In therapy you witness people finding that grace. You begin to see a clear path to a world in which we all fix one another from the inside out – from the heart – rather than from the top down. In short, you begin to have hope for a thing called humanity.

The world looks daunting at the moment, but we are tantalisingly close to a chain reaction of healing. We all have some degree of compassion for each other’s suffering; it only needs to reach a critical mass. But compassion – literally, suffering with, not detaching from – is hard to get people invested in, because they believe they have a thing called compassion fatigue. There’s no doubt about the genuine fatigue of our times. But it helps to ask ourselves: are we really sure it’s compassion that is making us weary?

It's worth examining our ideas about suffering. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics beautifully – with the cracks not hidden, but highlighted in gold. It often gets wheeled out as a metaphor of our renewal after life’s breakages. As if suffering has an end. As if we come back afterwards, in much the same shape. But that’s not really how life is. Our falls and our breakages teach us about the permanent return of falling and breaking, not the permanence of us. There’s no time to heal prettily, or to sanctify our woundedness with gold.

Human life is a frantic rout, a desperate rearguard action against the overwhelming force of mortality. Our lives may be creative, courageous, and tender – but because suffering is constant, they are always exhausting. The only choice we get is between passion – suffering alone – or compassion – suffering together. And so, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson: if you’re tired of compassion, you’re tired of life. Go it alone if you like, but it won’t be the end of your suffering. Washing our hands of humanity doesn’t make life less fatiguing – only more lonely.

Deep conversation with strangers teaches us this truth. How else are you going to know that no one is getting an easy ride, and that everyone deserves compassion? If you’re not a therapist, or a hospice nurse, or a hairdresser, or a teacher, or some other person who gets to be deeply present with strangers, then hopefully you have some other way of making that daily connection. Otherwise – partitioned by algorithms, isolated in our halls of mirrors – we begin to project instead. Whatever it is that we fear or loathe, this is what we begin to see in the brand that is humanity. And who could love such a toxic brand?

So the spiral deepens. We wash our hands. Our social disconnections begin to mirror the dehumanisation of our lives. When we lose compassion, we retreat to high ground. The right will die on the hill of purity, the left on the hill of moral certainty. Rather than actually do the patient and unglamorous work of healing, beginning in our street, we split into factions based on globalised ideas of how the world ought to be. We descend into what the journalist and writer Richard Lloyd Parry calls “the time of madness” – and when that time arrives, the descent is frighteningly sudden. He writes:

“...once the thing had started it gathered speed and power and continued until it had exhausted itself. This was the strangest and most fearful aspect of the violence [...]: that it could be so meticulous and methodical, and at the same time so completely out of control.” – Richard Lloyd Parry, In The Time Of Madness: Indonesia on the edge of chaos

He’s writing as an observer in East Timor, but he’s pointing to something universal. Those words could equally describe Kristallnacht, the Partition massacres in India and Pakistan, the Srebrenica genocide, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Rwandan genocide, the 7th October massacre in Israel, and the mass killings in Gaza. This is what happens, surely and inevitably, when human beings start to learn about strangers via disembodied channels, and not deeply, through shared presence. Individual fear suddenly coalesces into collective insanity.

This is the fate that awaits all of us, in all our societies, if we fail to anchor humanity’s brand in real human presence. The work begins with you and me, here at ground level – and the good news is that it begins with something in which we already have an immediate, selfish interest: our own mental health. To get out of our own exhausting spirals of despair, paranoia and nihilism, you and I need to find a way of falling back in love with this unlovable human race.

Love for humanity is a subtle, dwindling and pollutable resource. It turns out that just as we can choke the ocean with plastic, so we can envenom our shared imaginative life. This is existential pollution. And if we want to be sane, then you and I will have to fall back in love with our own species despite it. Like turtles navigating great gyres of trash to reach the coves of their birth, we will need to find some practical way.

If you’ve been following this newsletter, you won’t be surprised to hear me say that falling back in love with humanity is practical work, and that it is a choice. Love – as I suggested last time – is not a thunderbolt that you wait to be struck by. It’s just a choice to let someone fully exist. When you choose to let a stranger exist in all their dimensions, instead of seeing them only through the lens of your trauma, they become real. You don’t have to like them – they might still turn out to be a downer, a bully, or a bore – but you won’t ever know whether you like them until you work out how to love them first.

I have a neighbour, for example, who has political views I strongly disagree with, but who has also brought my dog home with great tenderness and care when she got locked out one day. This neighbour, I’m pretty sure, would walk into a burning building to rescue your kids or mine. Online or in the news, though, it’s only their politics I’d be seeing. We’re tuned in to a dehumanised transmission from humanity – and the broadcast is making us sick.

Under this onslaught, we humans do well to be as creative as we are, as tender as we are, as funny as we are. It’s surprisingly easy to love humans when you remember how much worse we could be. Exhausted, divided, and drowning in a torrent of lies, still we try to live by the light of our best angels, with whatever grace we can muster.

For the philosopher Simone Weil, grace is humanity’s best quality. “Grace fills empty spaces,” she writes, “but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.” Grace has this paradoxical quality of being unattainable until you already possess it. Which is why we can only heal with – and for – one another. In our traumatised world, a person who still has a little grace can lend it to us. That loan creates a space in which we can start to cultivate grace of our own.

To establish a relationship of grace between ourselves is the remedy for our personal mental health, and for the health of humanity. And if grace is not coming from the top, then it must come from the street. Healing is a very practical process. It starts locally, with any pretext you can find to get strangers talking. A river clean-up, a community garden, a cultural food swap, a death café, an upcycling workshop, a food bank, a choir, a football team, a history walk – whatever you can make stick. If you’re despairing of what you can do in these passionate times, start by bringing strangers together.

And if you don’t have time to form or join a group, reach out to just one stranger. Have a conversation that allows both of you to be heard, without judgment. Find grace together. Let your reaching out inspire them, and let their navigation of suffering inspire you. Keep going. Grow that compassion outward until it connects with the human race. Trust humanity to be coming to meet you. Our journey to a more humane world is a journey of grace, along stepping stones that rise with each footfall.

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Thank you for reading Human Again, a small dose of therapy in your in-box every week. Comments & feedback are how I learn. I also warmly welcome you sharing your own experiences. So please don’t hold back from leaving a comment.

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