Lately, I’ve started to sound like a broken record. Much of what I have been writing about circles the same themes — communication, listening, fullness of presence, attention and affection, and the quiet labor of relationship. I want to find something new, but I keep returning to some of these same themes. Maybe I’m just repeating myself. Or maybe we all are.

In our current times, we are bombarded with endless chatter, in journalism, social media, and everyday banter. And yet we’re still struggling with the same unlearned skill: how to see and hear one another.

This is a time of great division. The noise of the world has never been louder, and so few of us feel understood. We divide ourselves into groups of ideology and conviction, left or right, realist or idealist, moralist or pragmatist. Each convinced of its righteousness while losing the capacity to see the other with the same right to exist and as fully human.

What we’re witnessing isn’t only political or cultural fragmentation. It’s extreme and ongoing exhaustion. Both, on a moral and personal level. Distrust and uncertainty have become our common languages.

In this capitalist existence, we’ve cultivated hyper-individuality. Turning self-expression into a kind of marketplace performance. We mistake our assertiveness for personal connection, and our judgment for intimacy. We have become a culture fluent in expressing conviction but inarticulate in the art of compassion.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped practicing the common everyday acts that keep humanity intact: listening, paying attention, allowing someone else’s truth to sit beside our own. The irony is painful — the more energy we put towards shining the light on our personal beliefs, the less we truly see the people we care about and the world around us.

Perhaps that’s why I keep writing about the same stuff. Because repetition, after all, is how we learn. I return to what remains unresolved — both in myself, in what I see in others and in the culture I am surrounded by. And what remains unresolved continues to be in the same frame of things to write about… our need to be heard, to be understood, and to remember how to see each other as whole, again and again.

Shattering of Trust

Life has become far more complex in the information age. The speed at which news travels, the sheer volume of perspectives available, and the constant access to other people’s opinions have changed how we think — and how we relate. Every headline, post, reel or comment seems to demand that we form an immediate opinion. Even scrolling online offers an implied pressure to react and invites us to say something about everything.

I notice it in myself. Jumping to conclusions. I form half-shaped thoughts before I’ve had time to listen, research and learn. It takes time — real time — to process events and to hold space for all the nuances. But our digital culture doesn’t reward patience; it rewards individuality. And hasty opinions, offered too quickly, leaves no room for mutual understanding.

This constant flood of information has eroded trust. We no longer know what to believe — or who to believe — so we retreat into smaller circles that reflect our own biases. Online spaces amplify this fragmentation, rewarding outrage and punishing humility. Beneath the surface of our endless commentary and performance lives a quieter truth. We’ve forgotten how to be kind to one another, and even worse, how to care.  

We have stopped prioritizing the teaching of our children in how to be considerate. How to disagree without dehumanizing and humiliation. Apologize without justification. How to sit beside another person’s pain without rushing to fix it. These aren’t just niceties; they’re essential human skills. Without them, misunderstanding and becoming offended becomes our default mode, and distrust becomes one of our primary emotional armors.

Generosity of Attention and Affection

If distrust is the fracture of our time, then attention and affection has to be the beginning of its repair.

Affection is the antidote to fear.

Showing attention and affection to another person — genuine, unhurried attention — is one of the rarest and most generous acts we can offer. It asks us to set aside our fear of being misunderstood and to offer our empathic understanding. We no longer need to perform or reinforce our opinions. All that needs to happen is to allow for someone else’s experience to take shape in our presence.

Most people think generosity is about giving things away: money and resources. But giving our time, through our attention and affection is more intimate than any of those physical forms. It’s a form of love disguised as curiosity. To ask someone a real question about themselves — not by offering our unsolicited advice, with the intention to learn who they are — tells them that their life is worth something. In a culture obsessed with self-expression, curiosity about others has become almost extinct.

Yet generosity doesn’t live only in the act of giving. To receive is just as noble — sometimes even harder. To receive what another person offers, whether it’s their pain, their critical feedback, or their truth, without defending or fixing, is a deeper discipline of love. It asks for humility. It means allowing someone else’s experience to touch us without immediately trying to change it. To truly receive another person’s truth is to say, I can hold this with you.

We rarely notice how often our ego steers us toward wanting to show someone how important we are. We “listen” for how we want to respond, not really paying the closest attention we could. We try to compete with someone’s story to show them how we are cleverer than they are. But these habits don’t build connection — they make a separation between people. The person speaking feels unseen, and the listener feels an illusion of grandiosity from their own performance.

There’s a subtle choice that sits inside every conversation:
Do I want to convince someone that I’m important, or do I want to convince them that they are?

Our true presence and attention won’t compete for speaking time or another’s attention. It receives information actively, with kindness and grace. It allows the other person’s truth to land without interruption, and in doing so, tells them that what they feel is important and their life matters. It’s the way we hold the space to listen, to make room for someone else’s reality, that brings people closer to each other.

When we listen to understand instead of to respond, we engage the most human parts of ourselves — patience, humility, compassion. It requires us to be selfless enough to let someone else’s story reshape our perspective, even slightly. That is the quiet bravery of real connection. True attention and affection doesn’t strive to impress or agree. It simply stays — steady, curious, open.

If distrust has taught us to protect ourselves, offering our attention and affection teaches us that extension is an act of love. And in that act — the simple, ancient act of listening — we begin to remember what being human together feels like and the world quietly becomes a better place.

We talk about attention as if it’s a choice, but for most of human history, it was simply built into daily life.
You woke up and someone looked at you, noticed you, responded. Today, that small exchange is disappearing. The absence doesn’t look like neglect — it’s just normal now — but it leaves an emptiness we don’t quite name. And perhaps that’s part of our wider distress: so many people move through the day unseen, untouched by ordinary care.

Listening Means Burning Calories

Listening is not silence or passivity. It’s a living and felt presence. It’s alive, engaged, and unmistakably active and visible. A loud listener communicates through the body: the eyes that stay soft and steady, the posture that leans slightly forward that says, can you tell me more, I’m with you.

True listening dissolves any existing hierarchy— there is no performing, no one is better than or worse than. It’s not about waiting politely for a turn to speak, it’s about demonstrating that we are genuinely invested in the other person voice and everything they are trying to express.

Being a loud listener also means resisting the impulse to “top” someone else’s story — that quiet competition for who has suffered more, done more, or knows more. We do this without even realizing it, but every time we redirect attention back to ourselves, the bridge between us weakens and the hierarchy creeps back in. Listening well is a kind of humility: the willingness to let another person’s experience matter more than our need to step in and speak.

When we listen with that kind of fullness of presence — knowing there is nothing fix, advice is not being asked for, it’s not a performance — we offer something rare. We become a mirror that reflects back everyone’s worth, dignity and the right to feel the way they do. And that’s all a person needs: to know that they’ve been received.

Attending To Our Pain

If attention and affection are the beginnings of repair, then our relationship to pain determines how deep our healing can go. We learn more from processing our pain than from denying or compartmentalizing it. But denial has become one of our cultural reactions. We treat discomfort as something to avoid and dismiss instead of understanding.

Toxic positivity — the insistence on staying cheerful or “looking on the bright side” — has turned into a honorable performance. It avoids the very emotions that make empathy possible. We try to convince ourselves and others we are ok, as we are struggling. When we see pain and suffering in others, we rush in to reassure, correct, and say, “it’s not that bad”. By doing this, we silently tell them their darkness and pain is unwelcome. Isolating them further into the confines of individualistic thinking.

Real listening asks us to do the opposite: to stay close to what hurts. To be present to grief, frustration, and fear without trying to manually alter it. Because in time, all emotions are temporary, and it will all change on its own anyway. This kind of attention we can give to each other slows the transmission of pain through the web of humanity. When we listen to someone’s suffering without judgment or advice, we help them process it — not carry it alone, but carry it all the way through.

What we don’t want to do is absorb another’s pain and make it our own. Boundaries make that possible. They allow compassion to remain steady without collapsing under the weight of empathy. True presence is firm but porous: we feel with others, not take pity on them.

Every time we meet suffering with presence instead of denial or avoidance, we change its trajectory. Pain that is listened to becomes bearable; pain that is ignored manifests and spreads. Our willingness to stay with difficulty — in ourselves and others — is how we stop the any harm from passing from one heart to another.

Boundaries, Ego, and the Evolution of Compassion

Compassion is often mistaken for limitlessness giving. As if to care deeply means to take responsibility for others pain. And do anything and everything to alleviate their pain. But compassion without boundaries can quickly wear us down. This is when empathy isn’t guided by discernment. Real compassion requires both an open heart and a solid backbone.

Boundaries protect love from becoming distorted. Reminding us that to offer our presence doesn’t mean to absorb another’s pain, to lose ourselves in their story, or to abandon our own limitations. The strongest compassion holds two truths at once: your suffering matters, and so does my capacity to stay whole while walking beside you.

Our ego wants to interrupt the process because it senses the difficulty in sitting with others pain. The rescue begins, convincing ourselves help is needed, because we have the best advice, fixing to prove our worthiness. But these impulses, while always well-intentioned, does not show our genuine care. When compassion becomes a performance, it stops being compassion and becomes control.

The evolution of compassion asks for our complete humility — to recognize that we don’t and cannot heal others. We accompany them because we know all we have are the answers for ourselves. We cannot restore someone else’s equilibrium by convincing each person of our brilliance. But through our willingness to meet someone where they are, not where we think they should be, it helps them find their own answers. It’s the choice to stay kind, empathetic and compassionate so others can find the depth of their own wisdom.

Having our own good boundaries make compassion possible. It helps stop us from burning out when we reach our limits, keeping our care to be sustainable. We learn what feelings belong to us and which belong to someone else without becoming entangled. This is what emotional maturity looks like, knowing how to hold other’s feelings without losing ourselves in the process.

Our relational evolution depends on this balance: ego tempered by humility, compassion anchored by boundaries, care guided by empathy. It’s the practice of “loving well” without losing ourselves — and being strong enough to stay gentle to the people we care about the most when the difficulty of the topics keeps testing our resolve. Learning to lean into this balance, when to open, when to pause, when to step back, when to push forward — is where intuition becomes essential.

Intuition, Repair & Healing

Intuition is often dismissed as vague and untrustworthy, but it’s one of our deepest sources of internal guidance. It’s what that tells us when something feels off — when we’ve overstepped our boundaries, slacking on our presence and attention, or failed to offer compassion where it was needed. It’s also the voice that brings us closer to truth, to empathy, and to connection.

Our intuition sharpens through practice — by being present to and processing our pain and suffering. Forcing us to pay attention to what expands our awareness and what closes us down. When we ignore the reality of our pain, we tend to build armor around our hearts. When we listen, we begin to improve our practice of “loving well”, offering our attention and affection back to ourselves and outward to others.

Repair and healing — for ourselves, in our relationships, in communities, in culture — begins with this kind of inward intuitive listening. Asking where we feel misaligned with ourselves and gathering the courage to respond differently. Sometimes that means being quiet, taking a time out, instead of trying to formulate a premature response. Sometimes it means apologizing even when we know we did nothing wrong or speaking when it would be easier notto. Intuition doesn’t make itself known loudly, it’s a whisper. Its wisdom lives in between the spoken word, in the silence; in the pauses we rarely make.

This kind of healing and repair is slow work. It happens moment to moment, and one conversation at a time. It’s in the skills of how we train ourselves to listen, how we set boundaries, how we choose honesty over comfort. It’s not about perfection; it’s about returning, again and again, to empathy, kindness and care.

To be heard and to be seen begins here — in our willingness to stay present with another person. To be honest about our own pain and suffering and to remain open to each other’s. To offer our attention and affections freely. It is the offering of ourselves with generosity, because “love is extension”. If we can do that and be willing to make mistakes and apologize for them, we create small circles of trust that begin to hold the larger world together.

Esther Perel – A Lesson In Listening: Attention and Affection