22. How To Stay Sane In An Age Of Division | Elif Shafak
Buy this powerful little book here.
Friends,
If you’ve never heard of Elif, I suggest getting to know her writing here and listening to her speak here.
I’ll admit, this book was the first of hers I’d read and I loved all 89 pages of her.
Here’s a few magnificent paragraphs to remember:
“The moment we stop listening to diverse opinions is also when we stop learning. Because the truth is we don’t learn much from sameness and monotony. We usually learn from differences.”
“Feeling systematically unheard, unsupported or unappreciated can make me painfully resentful, and abiding resentment will probably turn me into a reluctant listener. If and when I am a reluctant listener, I will also become a poor learner. I will interact less and less with theories and opinions that do not agree with mine. And there will come a point when I will simply stop talking to people who are different from me. Why should I even trust them?”
“Ours is the age of contagious anxiety. A deep and ever deepening worry about the state of the world, and our place in it, or placeless-ness. From newspaper headlines to lead stories to social media posts, there is one term that frequently appears in our daily lives: crisis.
In a study conducted by the Institute for Social Research scholars have found that ‘when exposed to less positive news, people posted less positive comments and more negative ones. When exposed to less negative posts, the opposite pattern occurred.” 1
*Anger, Fear and Echo Chambers: The Emotional Basis for Online Behaviour