The document is called Magnifica Humanitas, Magnificent Humanity. Whether you are Catholic, secular, a teacher, a parent, a technologist, or a journalist watching the world reorder itself in real time, it deserves our attention. Not because of its theological framework, but because what it says is the most deeply inconvenient thing anyone could say at this moment in our history, and it is inconvenient for almost everyone.

The encyclical covers 245 numbered paragraphs across five chapters. Its central argument can be stated simply: AI is not evil, but it is not neutral, and we are failing to govern it with anything close to the wisdom it demands.

The most precise line in the document is this one: Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.

That sentence cuts in every direction at once. It makes the AI companies accountable. It makes governments accountable. It makes the rest of us accountable too.

Pope Leo’s prescription is equally unambiguous. Artificial intelligence, he wrote, needs to be “disarmed.” He acknowledged the word was strong. He said it was chosen deliberately, because the moment requires language that awakens rather than soothes.

Several of his positions pushed well beyond what most secular institutions have been willing to say.

On autonomous weapons, he drew a hard line: decisions involving lethal force must never be delegated to machines. Moral judgment requires conscience and personal responsibility that algorithms cannot possess. And then, the line that drew the most gasps, he declared that traditional just-war theory is “now outdated.” The framework that has governed Western ethics on warfare for centuries, he argued, was not designed for a world in which machine systems can lower the threshold for violence without a human ever pulling a trigger. An idea straight out of the mouth of Hannad Arendt.

On power and data, he named the structural problem directly. Data is a common good, he wrote. Algorithms and digital platforms should serve all people. The growing concentration of AI capability in the hands of a small number of corporations risks creating new forms of inequality that is economic, political, and epistemic. The ability to know, to be seen, to participate: these are being distributed unequally, and the encyclical says so bluntly.

He also addressed the colonial dimension of AI infrastructure, rare in any major institutional document, pointing to the extractive mining industries in the Global South that supply the minerals required for data centers and AI hardware. The benefits of AI accrue to the wealthy. The costs are borne by those who never consented to them.

The document includes a formal apology from the Catholic Church for its historical role in tolerating slavery. Unusual? Yes. But the spine of the encyclical is a call for human dignity across its full arc. You cannot argue for that principle while remaining silent on the moments the Church itself violated it.

The frame holding all of this together is a binary: humanity can either construct Babel, a tower of accumulated technological power that collapses into confusion and hierarchy, or rebuild Jerusalem, a community oriented toward shared humanity. It is not a metaphor about religion. It is a metaphor about who holds power, and for whom.

Beyond the geopolitical arguments, beyond the condemnation of autonomous weapons and deepfakes in politics, beyond the structural critique of Silicon Valley concentration — there is a philosophical claim at the center of Magnifica Humanitas that is subtler, and possibly more important.

Pope Leo identifies what he calls the deepest danger of our current moment. It is not job loss. It is not surveillance. It is not even autonomous weapons.

It is the possibility that human beings will begin to see themselves, and each other, as projects to be optimized.

Against this, the encyclical makes a striking argument. Human limits like illness, aging, suffering, vulnerability, failure, are not defects to be engineered away. They are, in many cases, the very conditions in which human beings discover wisdom, experience genuine closeness with others, and become most fully themselves. What makes us human is not our processing speed. It is not our memory capacity, our pattern recognition, or our ability to produce fluent text.

It is something more like what we carry: the lessons etched like scars, the memory of the journey between freedom and falls, between dreams and disappointments.

This is what no algorithm can translate into a digital experience.

An AI system can simulate empathy, and do so convincingly. It can produce language that sounds like grief, like longing, like hope. But it has never received a scary diagnosis. It has not held someone’s hand at the end of a long life. It has not made the wrong choice and lived inside the consequence for years. It has not changed itself because it felt shameful.

The capacity to grow, as distinct from the capacity to be updated, is something that happens only under the pressure of actual experience, of having something real at stake, of knowing that time moves in one direction, and that it is finite.

This is not a religious claim. It is an anthropological one. And it is the most important question the current moment is forcing us to answer: not what AI can do, but what it cannot.

The encyclical’s answer is unambiguous. It cannot replicate the weight of a human life.

Magnifica Humanitas was signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical on labor in the industrial age. The parallel was deliberate. The original Leo wrote into a world reshaped by machinery, by displacement, by the concentration of capital in few hands. This Leo is writing at that same inflection point. The question isn’t what we lose when AI replicates us. It’s what we lose when it can’t, but we accept the imitation anyway.

The full text of Magnifica Humanitas is available for free at the Vatican website.

There is a particular kind of dread that has settled over a lot of us right now. You feel it when you look down the corridor of your career and cannot find the horizon. You feel it when you open your banking app and watch interest rates and stocks move in directions that obey no known logic. You feel it as your morning coffee goes cold while you wonder whether any of the skills you spent years building still mean what they used to.

Most of us, no matter our background, no matter how stable or precarious our circumstances, are carrying some version of this question: What is going to be asked of me next?

I will admit something. I feel, strange as it sounds, a kind of gratitude for my childhood. Not for the hardship itself. But for what the hardship built in me without my knowing it.

My family did not choose flexibility as a philosophy. The world changed on them overnight, and they had no option but to change with it. When the Islamic Revolution unfurled in Iran, my parents became refugees. Their degrees, earned at real cost and real sacrifice, stopped meaning anything the moment they arrived, nameless and displaced, in a new country. The education didn’t transfer. The credentials didn’t count. Whatever life they had imagined for themselves at middle age, they had to let it go.

What I absorbed watching them, without having words for it at the time, was a kind of muscle. A capacity to release the version of life you planned for and find your footing in the version that actually arrived.

I think a lot of us are being asked to develop that muscle right now.

Psychologists who study resilience have spent decades trying to understand what allows some people to absorb profound disruption and keep going. Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota, was one of the first. He spent forty years visiting schools in economically depressed areas, looking specifically for children who should have struggled and didn’t. Children who arrived each day composed, even dignified, no matter what was happening at home.

What he found opened a new line of inquiry. Resilience was not a fixed trait, distributed unevenly at birth. It was something that could be identified, studied, and learned.

In 1989, developmental psychologist Emmy Werner published the results of a thirty-two-year study following nearly seven hundred children in Kauai, Hawaii, from birth into adulthood. One third had grown up in genuinely difficult circumstances. Among that group, roughly two thirds developed serious problems by adolescence. But the remaining third became, in Werner’s words, “competent, confident, and caring young adults.” What set them apart was not exceptional talent. It was something more interior. They tended to believe that their choices and actions shaped their outcomes. They had what researchers call an internal locus of control. They saw themselves, not their circumstances, as the authors of their fates.

That quality, Werner found, is not permanent. Resilience shifts. Stack enough stressors on a person at vulnerable moments and even the most resilient child can break. But the reverse is also true. People who were not resilient early in life can learn the skills later. They can catch up. They can even flourish.

George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, has spent over two decades studying how people respond to loss and disruption. His central argument cuts through a lot of the jargon around this subject. An event, he argues, is not traumatic until we experience it as traumatic. What matters is not the event itself but how we frame it.

This is not the same as toxic positivity. It is not “look on the bright side.” It is something more demanding and more honest than that.

Bonanno points to research showing that people can be trained to shift how they explain adversity to themselves. From internal to external (”this did not happen because I am fundamentally broken”). From global to specific (”this is one narrow thing, not a verdict on my entire life”). From permanent to impermanent (”this can change, even if I cannot change it today”). These shifts are learnable. They have measurable effects on wellbeing and performance. Neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner’s work at Columbia also shows that teaching people to reframe how they perceive difficult stimuli actually changes how they experience and react to them. The training holds over time.

There is also the harder, quieter work that has to come first.

Grief.

Not wallowing. Not rumination, which research consistently shows makes us more fragile, not less. But genuine, clear-eyed acknowledgment of what we have lost, or what we are losing. The career path we believed in. The expertise we thought would carry us. The version of ourselves we expected to be at this point.

Psychologist Martin Seligman, who pioneered much of the field of positive psychology, found that the people who navigated adversity best were those who could hold loss as specific and temporary rather than total and permanent. They could grieve without letting the grief become the whole story.

That is a skill. And It can be practiced.

My father was born into a wealthy family. He was sent to a posh British boarding school as a boy, studied engineering at a British university, and came home to Iran with a Devonshire accent and a management role at a major oil refinery. From the outside, it looked like the most solid and respectable of lives. I had nannies and went to playgrounds with children from the UK and France and Italy. We lived in a prefabricated town built for the foreigners getting wealthy off Iranian oil. Our city was the first in the country to get soft-serve ice cream.

His real dream, though, had always been cars. His wealthy family saw that as the work of labourers. So he kept his comfortable life and tinkered on weekends.

When the Islamic Revolution came, he was given a choice: pledge allegiance to the new Islamic Republic and keep everything, or refuse and lose it all. He chose his integrity over his things.

When that wasn’t enough, and the Republic came for lives instead of livelihoods, we became refugees. We arrived in Canada during a recession and he took a job as a mechanic. He worked his way up to parts service supervisor at a car dealership, then several car dealerships, spending years as the last person hired and the first laid off when the numbers turned bad.

Over time, he earned a reputation for being very good at very hard car problems. He procured parts for someone in Oklahoma with an Impala whose transmission had turned to dust. He rescued a Ford Deuce that had been in a family for generations. Then he leased a warehouse. People shipped him priceless vehicles from across the continent. I grew up in the back seats of cars that were not fit to drive, until they were, and then they left for another family and we got a new clunker for him to rebuild. Some of those cars ended up in famous auctions on television. He would sit and watch them happily, recounting for me all the drama behind every bolt and lick of custom paint. He could rebuild an undercarriage with his eyes closed. He taught me how to change my tires, my oil, and once, a timing belt.

He won admiration, friends, and a full life again. He got to live the life of his dreams. He just had to lose everything he thought he wanted first.

He passed away in the early weeks of Covid, suddenly. People came to his funeral whose cars he had rebuilt, and drove behind his cortege with custom bumper stickers bearing his name and face.

I don’t think he knew, in those early years in Canada, that he was moving toward something. He was just surviving. He was flexible because rigidity would have meant collapse. He grieved what was gone. And then he kept going.

I wonder sometimes, as I watch what is happening around us, what waits on the other side of this particular passage. The honest answer is that I don’t know. Nobody does.

But the science is clear on one thing, and my father’s story confirms it. Adaptability is not a personality type. It is not something you either have or you don’t. It is as simple as continuing to move forward, or sideways, in any direction really, just as long as you just keep moving.

Grieve the life you thought you were going to have. Let it be real. And then ask yourself what this moment might be making possible.

My father didn’t get the life he had earned, but he got a great one anyway.

I believe that is still available to all of us.

In 2009, I had an idea for a story while I was in Baghdad. I already had a name for it: The Widow of Baghdad. I wanted to use the abrupt tragedy of love lost to capture a city frozen by war, all its plans and construction projects, dashed. I just needed a widow.

I met Samira in the lobby of a hotel in Baghdad, over club sandwiches without ham. She arrived dressed like a panther who had eaten a canary. Animal print. Dyed honey-blond hair. Not a trace of mourning in sight. She was also, persistently, the only woman still working at Baghdad International Airport. I had constructed someone else entirely in my mind. Someone softer. More defeated.

She told me about her husband. A university professor. She had been the girl in the canary yellow dress in the front row. They married. He was tall, lean, outspoken. He left work alone one evening and never made it home. An assassin described him vaguely afterward in a record I found in a police station. Tall, academic, critical of Saddam’s regime. A routine elimination.

She told me she would never remarry. Never love again.

Then she told me about her colleague Faizeh, who used to drive her to work and stop for coffee. Once, at a gas station, a man told her to cover her hair. Faizeh replied: “Every day this country is a new country. A country is what we make of it.” The man dragged her from the car and shot her dead in front of Samira.

Three days later, Samira went back to work alone.

I had come looking for a metaphor about grief and got something else entirely. I got a woman who had absorbed every reason to stop, and simply had not.

On my way back through the hotel I passed a makeshift food stand between the perimeter wall and the hotel entrance. A man in his forties and his son, maybe ten, served hummus, foul, taameya, and sometimes fish. I sat down to type up Samira’s story. I looked up just in time to see the father hold out a glass of water to his son. The boy carried it to the corner, where a single tree grew in a plastic pot. A date palm. He poured the water around its base. Water was precious. They had refused me extra when I asked. But every evening, without fail, they watered that tree.

I think about persistence differently than I used to.

I used to think it meant not giving up. Enduring. A kind of grim, teeth-clenched refusal to be counted out. The popular imagination tends to romanticise it this way: the lone individual holding on through sheer force of will. But the research tells a more interesting story.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth, whose work on what she calls “grit” has become foundational in education and performance science, defines persistence not as stubbornness but as the sustained combination of passion and long-term effort toward a goal. In studies spanning West Point cadets, National Spelling Bee competitors, and inner-city schoolchildren, she found consistently that grit predicted achievement better than IQ, talent, or socioeconomic background. The cadets most likely to complete the notoriously gruelling first summer were not the strongest or the smartest. They were the ones who kept going.

What her research also shows, and what tends to get less attention, is that persistence is not a fixed trait. It is built. It is practised. It is, in the language of Carol Dweck’s parallel work on growth mindset at Stanford, a skill that develops through repeated engagement with difficulty, not avoidance of it. You do not arrive at persistence. You accumulate it.

Political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research on civil resistance adds a structural dimension to this. Analysing hundreds of political campaigns over more than a century, she found that nonviolent movements that sustained active participation from at least 3.5 percent of a population have never failed to achieve their goals. Never. The number is surprisingly small. But the word sustained is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The movements that failed were often not lacking in passion or numbers at their peak. They were lacking in persistence.

And it requires a particular kind of faith. Not religious faith, necessarily, though that sustains many people. A structural faith: the belief that what you are building now will matter later, even if you cannot see how.

I have been covering the Iran conflict for AFP since the beginning, watching the machinery of war inch slowly towards the machinery of diplomacy. The talks are now in Islamabad. Every headline is about enrichment percentages, missile programmes, and who controls the Strait. And the Iranian people, who have been resisting the IRGC for more than forty years, who took to the streets in the largest protests since the 1979 revolution, who kept going when the internet was cut and the military deployed and thousands were killed and tens of thousands arrested, are still being left outside the room.

This is not new. People have always been left outside the room. What is also not new is what happens when they refuse to accept that as the final answer.

In 1998, two women from the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition forced their way into the Good Friday Agreement negotiations. No party apparatus. Almost no resources. They were told, plainly, that they did not belong there. They showed up anyway. They stayed at the table until civilian inclusion was part of the language of the agreement.

There were Cambodian documentation networks whose evidence shaped the Paris Peace Accords. Bosnian civil society organisations pushed civilian protection clauses into the Dayton Agreement. Files full of violations committed in Yugoslavia were dismissed as irrelevant to peace talks, until they became the foundation of war crimes indictments that rewrote an entire post-war political order.

None of this happened because the world suddenly decided to care. It happened because people kept building the case after the cameras moved on.

Persistence is one of the twenty virtues at the centre of the character education work I do alongside my journalism. And I will be honest: it is not the most poetic one. It does not shimmer the way curiosity does. It does not carry the moral weight of courage or the warmth of empathy. It is quiet and unglamorous.

It is also, the evidence suggests, among the most consequential. A 2019 meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin, reviewing more than 80 studies on perseverance and academic achievement, found it to be one of the strongest predictors of long-term outcomes across cultures and contexts. Not intelligence. Not resources. The willingness to keep going.

Which presents an uncomfortable implication. If persistence is buildable, teachable, and this powerful, then the question of who gets to develop it, and under what conditions, matters enormously. Research consistently shows that persistence is harder to sustain under chronic stress, trauma, and instability. The same conditions, in other words, that conflict and authoritarianism systematically produce. The IRGC has not only imprisoned and killed. It has spent forty years manufacturing the precise conditions that erode the capacity to persist.

That is not incidental. That is the strategy.

If we want the Iranian people to have a seat at the table in Islamabad, the path is not outrage. Outrage has a short shelf life. Research on what is sometimes called “compassion fatigue” shows that emotional responses to crisis peak early and decay quickly, particularly in media audiences exposed to repeated coverage of the same conflict. Outrage peaks and falls and exhausts the people who carry it. The path is meticulous, organised, specific, sustained pressure. It is benchmarking sanctions relief to human rights conditions. It is coalition-building with Ukrainians and Syrians and every community that knows what it means to be erased from negotiations about their own future. It is documentation. Names, dates, locations, testimonies. Memory that becomes leverage because it is ready.

It is not the dramatic work. It is not the work that gets covered.

On my last day, I was stranded at Baghdad International Airport for eighteen hours. A sandstorm had grounded every plane. I sat on the ground with other passengers, with no expectation of comfort or schedule.

Samira was working. She moved through the terminal like someone who had decided, a long time ago, that this place was hers to look after. She saw me, caught my eye, and gave a small lift of her chin. A precise gesture. It said: you will be fine.

When it was finally time to board, she took our seat slips at the gate. As I passed, she stopped me. From her pocket she produced something small and placed it in my palm.

“This is all I have on me,” she said. “I grow them in my yard. They won’t serve anything to eat on the flight.”

Two plump dates.

I have thought about that gesture many times since. A woman tending a garden. Producing something from it. Pressing it into the hand of a stranger before sending her out into a storm.

I think that is what persistence tastes like.

In 2009, I had an idea for a story while I was in Baghdad. I already had a name for it, I was going to call it The Widow of Baghdad. I wanted to use the metaphor of the abrupt tragedy of love lost to capture the way the city was frozen by war, all its plans and construction projects, dashed. I just needed a widow.

I met Samira in the lobby of a hotel in Baghdad, over club sandwiches without ham. She arrived dressed like a panther who had eaten a canary. Animal print. Dyed honey-blond hair. Not a trace of mourning in sight. She was also, persistently, the only woman still working at Baghdad International Airport. I had constructed someone else entirely in my mind. Someone softer. More defeated.

She told me about her husband. A university professor. She had been the girl in the canary yellow dress in the front row. They married. He was tall, lean, outspoken. He left work alone one evening and never made it home. An assassin described him vaguely afterward in a record I found in a police station. Tall, academic, critical of Saddam’s regime. A routine elimination.

She told me she would never remarry. Never love again.

Then she told me about her colleague Faizeh, who used to drive her to work and stop for coffee. Once, at a gas station on the way to work, a man told her to cover her hair, saying, “It’s a new country.” Faizeh replied: “Every day this country is a new country. A country is what we make of it.” The man dragged her from the car and right there in front of Samira, shot her dead.

Three days later, Samira went back to work alone.

I had come looking for a metaphor about grief and got something else entirely. I got a woman who had absorbed every reason to stop, and simply had not.

I said goodbye to her in the parking lot. On my way back I passed a makeshift food stand that was between the perimeter wall and the hotel. There, a man in his forties and his son, maybe ten, served hummus, foul, taameya, and sometimes fish. For twenty cents more, the boy would bring you a Coca-Cola or Sprite from a humming fridge connected to a generator.

They fed hotel staff and security, journalists and drivers. Their tabouli overflowed with parsley, cucumbers, and tomatoes. The boy fetched plates with joy, then perched on a plastic stool and watched Turkish soap operas dubbed in Arabic.

I often ate there. It was quieter than my room. The hum of the generator and the fake drama of television felt oddly comforting. I decided to sit down and type up Samira’s story. Her life halted mid-step, like the city’s many half-built skyscrapers.

I looked up just in time to see the father look at his son and hold out a glass of water to him. The boy fetched it and carried it to the corner, where a single tree grew in a plastic pot.

A palm. A date palm. He poured the water around its base.

I looked around. No one else was watching this. Water was precious, but here they were, under tarp and tin, cultivating a date palm in the cracked driveway of the hotel.

I think about persistence differently than I used to.

I used to think it meant not giving up. Enduring. A kind of grim, teeth-clenched refusal to be counted out. But the more I report from places where people have been waiting for justice long enough to outlive their patience, the more I understand that persistence is an active thing. It is organised. It is strategic. It chooses, every single day, to keep showing up even when the room has emptied.

And it requires a particular kind of faith. Not religious faith, necessarily, though that sustains many people. A structural faith: the belief that what you are building now will matter later, even if you cannot see how.

I have been covering the Iran conflict for AFP since the beginning, watching the machinery of war inch slowly towards the machinery of diplomacy. The talks are now in Islamabad. Every headline is about enrichment percentages, missile programmes, and who controls the Strait. And the Iranian people, who have been resisting the IRGC for more than forty years, who took to the streets in the largest protests since the 1979 revolution, who kept going when the internet was cut and the military deployed and thousands were killed and tens of thousands arrested, are still being left outside the room.

This is not new. People have always been left outside the room. What is also not new is what happens when they refuse to accept that as the final answer.

In 1998, two women from the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition forced their way into the Good Friday Agreement negotiations. No party apparatus. Almost no resources. They were told, plainly, that they did not belong there. They showed up anyway. They stayed at the table until civilian inclusion was part of the language of the agreement.

There were Cambodian documentation networks whose evidence shaped the Paris Peace Accords. There were Bosnian civil society organisations that pushed civilian protection clauses into the Dayton Agreement. People collected files full of violations committed in Yugoslavia, that were dismissed as irrelevant to peace talks, until they became the foundation of war crimes indictments that rewrote an entire post-war political order.

None of this happened because the world suddenly decided to care. It happened because people kept building the case after the cameras moved on.

Our character is built around many virtues. Persistence is one of them, and I will be honest: it is not the most poetic one. It does not shimmer the way curiosity does. It does not carry the moral weight of courage or the warmth of empathy. It is quiet and unglamorous, and it requires something of you that most skills do not. It requires you to be willing to look unremarkable. To keep doing the work even when there is nothing to show for it.

If we want the Iranian people to have a seat at the table in Islamabad, the path is not outrage. Outrage has a short shelf life. It peaks and it falls and it exhausts the people who carry it. The path is meticulous, organised, specific, sustained pressure. It is benchmarking sanctions relief to human rights conditions. It is coalition-building with Ukrainians and Syrians and every community that knows what it means to be erased from negotiations about their own future. It is documentation. Names, dates, locations, testimonies. Memory that becomes leverage because it is ready.

It is not the dramatic work. It is not the work that gets covered.

On my last day, I was stranded at Baghdad International Airport for eighteen hours. A sandstorm had grounded every plane. I sat on the ground with other passengers, with no expectation of comfort or schedule.

Samira, was working. She moved through the terminal like someone who had decided, a long time ago, that this place was hers to look after. She saw me, caught my eye, and gave a small lift of her chin. It was a precise gesture. It said: you will be fine.

When it was finally time to board, she took our seat slips at the gate. As I passed, she stopped me. From her pocket she produced something small and placed it in my palm.

“This is all I have on me,” she said. “I grow them in my yard. They won’t serve anything to eat on the flight.”

Two plump dates.

I have thought about that gesture many times since. A woman tending a garden. Producing something from it. Pressing it into the hand of a stranger before sending her out into a storm.

The shorter one is free. No gates, no barriers. Just come read. It’s an easy read that I hope will stay with you and that you will come back with questions about.

The longer think piece goes a little more in depth and it is behind a paywall, and I want to be honest about why: every paid subscription directly funds the Conscioushood curriculum. We’re building something I genuinely believe the world needs right now, character education for young learners, designed to give them the internal architecture to navigate a complex world with integrity, resilience, and moral imagination. Getting it into schools takes resources. Your support makes that possible.

If the paywall is a barrier for you, please just send me a message. I’ll send you the piece, no questions asked. Access to ideas should never depend on a bank balance.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for caring about this work.

- Maryam

People often ask me how I stay sane.

It is a reasonable question. I spend most of my days inside the channels of extremist groups, tracking their conversations, measuring in my head the distance between bluster and imminent violence. I have worked in places where the worst of humanity has been brought to bear on the most vulnerable people imaginable, and part of my job, when I return, is to keep a kind of tally. To account for the damage we have done to each other.

The honest answer is that the worst places I have ever been have also shown me things I cannot explain away. The first responders who run toward the sound of a second strike, knowing what a double-tap means. The neighbors who appear with food before anyone has thought to ask. The teachers holding class in a tent with no floor because the school is rubble and the children still need somewhere to go. The way communities, in the middle of devastating loss, find a way to create meaning, purpose, humor, and some fragile, stubborn dream of a future. I have watched human beings survive things that, if you had described them to me in the abstract, I would have said were unsurvivable. And then I watched them survive. That is what bearing witness does, if you let it. It recalibrates the ceiling of what you believe people are capable of.

But the thing that quietly sustains me is something smaller than all of that. Something that happens not in the field, but afterward, when I sit down and share what I have seen.

Every time I publish something, I am flooded with messages. People writing to say thank you for explaining something they had assumed was beyond them, or for telling them something they simply did not know. And what I notice, each time, is not the gratitude itself but what it requires. To write that message, a person has to be willing to admit, to a stranger, in an era that rewards the performance of certainty above almost everything else, that there was something they didn’t understand. That they needed someone else to help them see it. That willingness, quiet and unremarkable as it appears, is a form of courage. It is also, and this is the part I keep returning to, a form of humility.

Psychologist Elizabeth Krumrei Mancuso at Pepperdine University has spent years studying what she calls intellectual humility, which she defines as an awareness of how incomplete and fallible our own views actually are. In her research, people who scored high on this quality were consistently less polarized, less aggressive toward those who held different beliefs, and significantly harder to manipulate. Not because they lacked conviction, but because they held their convictions alongside a genuine openness to being wrong. Certainty, it turns out, is not the same as strength.

We do not tend to celebrate humility in our culture. We celebrate the person on the stage, the one whose confidence fills the room, the one who speaks as though they already have all the answers. There is something genuinely valuable in that quality. Confidence drives people to attempt things that would otherwise seem impossible, and the world needs people willing to attempt impossible things. But confidence without humility is a closed system. It can perform, but it cannot grow. Nothing new gets in.

What humility does, quietly and without fanfare, is keep us teachable. It keeps us honest about the size of what we do not yet understand. And in my experience, it is consistently present in the people who actually help things move forward: the ones who ask before they act, who listen before they speak, who are willing to consider that the person in front of them might be holding a piece of the picture they are missing.

Every message I receive from someone who says “I didn’t know that, thank you” gives me hope. Not because it flatters me. But because it tells me that humility is still alive in us, even now, even in this noisy and exhausting moment. And if we can stay humble enough to keep learning from each other, I think we can handle whatever comes next.

We don’t have to have all the answers. We just have to stay open to finding them.

This week’s virtue: Humility The ability to know what you don’t know, and to stay open to learning from those around you.

At least once, maybe twice a week, someone will ask me: how do you stay sane?

It is a reasonable question. I spend most of my days inside the channels of extremist groups, tracking their conversations, measuring in my head the distance between bluster and imminent violence. I have worked in places where the worst of humanity has been brought to bear on the most vulnerable people imaginable, and part of my job is to keep a kind of tally of the damage we have done to each other. To account for what we lose, or have lost. So the question is not cynical. It is genuinely curious. How do you look at all of that, year after year, and not arrive at some terminal conclusion about what we are?

The honest answer is that the worst places I have ever been have also shown me things I cannot explain away. It sounds like a cliche until you have actually stood in the face of it. It is in the sheer unspeakable selflessness of first responders I saw in Gaza who ran toward the smoke of a strike, knowing full well what a double-tap means. Or the terrifying gang-members in Haiti whose slum Sitay Solay was skipped for humanitarian relief, because it was too dangerous for aid agencies to even fly over. So they looted stores for water and then distributed bottles home by home.

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The frameworks we inherited for thinking about loyalty were built for more stable conditions. Stay. Commit. Don’t quit. They made sense when the things asking for your loyalty were more or less what they claimed to be. That assumption has not held.

To be clear, I am not referring to loyalty to a football team, or to a friend who occasionally needs you at 2 am. That kind of loyalty still makes sense. I mean the kind we are often called to perform for identity and nation, when conflict in the world emerges. Loyalty to a flag. To a government. To a side we have chosen.

Right now, millions of people around the world are being squeezed by that question, and they don’t know how to answer it without losing something.

This has become a kind of crisis some. Take Iranians living abroad. Many of them in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany came to those countries carrying wounds. They left a country that surveilled, imprisoned, and silenced their families. They built lives somewhere new. They love the people still living inside Iran. They want freedom for them. Desperately.

But when a foreign government announces it will bomb Iran in the name of liberation, something complicated happens inside them. They have seen this movie before. They know what “liberation” looks like from the inside of a country being liberated. They have questions. And yet, to ask those questions out loud is to risk being called a traitor to the cause of Iranian freedom. So many of them go quiet.

I know this territory personally. My family refused to sign loyalty documents to the Islamic Republic when I was a child. The IRGC stripped us of our citizenship, our passports, our official identity, in response. We fled. And yet in recent weeks, I have been accused of being a spokesperson for that same regime, simply for asking whether a bombing campaign is the right instrument for someone else’s freedom.

This is what loyalty traps look like. They are designed to silence you. They work by making questions feel like a betrayal.

Americans are living inside their own version of this. Many want to stand with Palestinians. They have watched two years of devastation in Gaza and suffered the moral injury of their country’s role in it. Now the same government has pivoted to talking about liberating Iranians, and the country that has most loudly championed Palestinian rights has been Iran. How do you hold all of that without your conscience folding in on itself?

You can’t. Not if you keep trying to choose a side drawn by someone else.

In my work my job is to look at a thing truthfully, to see it for what it is, and represent that in my reporting as faithfully as I can. I don’t fear that by telling the world what the Islamic Republic of Iran is and what it isn’t when I see hyperbole and hysteria around it, that I am betraying Iranians. I believe that seeing a thing, or a person for what it really is, the good and the bad is the only way to truthfully and effectively engage with it, to change it.

Loyalty, at its core, is about who you refuse to abandon. It is not passive. It is a choice you make under pressure, at a cost. And when we strip away the flags and the party lines, most of us, if we are honest, feel a pull toward something simpler and harder to explain: the person in front of us. The child we will never meet but reminds us of our own. The family across the border who is running, just like ours once ran.

That is not naive. That is ancient. Long before nations existed, humans survived because they were loyal to each other across difference, across tribes, across seasons, across disaster. Humans need each other more than we need passports. In hard times, we know which will endure.

My grandfather knew this firsthand. He was imprisoned in a Siberian gulag for seven years for being a politically subversive storyteller. When he was released, the USSR stripped him of his citizenship and dropped him at the border of Iran. He purchased a new identity and a new name from a deceased man, and began again. Decades later, when his daughter — my mother — became politically active and put the family at odds with the new Islamic Republic, he was forced into exile once more. He was 86 years old when he stood beside me and became a Canadian. He passed away in hospice care, watched over by nurses from the former Yugoslavia and Barbados.

He had four identities in three countries. Two empires tried to erase him and he outlived both of them (Stalin and the Shah). But none of that matters because at the end, strangers from across the world were holding his hand and listening to his stories.

Whatever we tell ourselves about what divides us and who we are tied to, we keep finding each other anyway. The people who show up are rarely the ones who ask for our allegiance.

A Practice for When the Trap Arrives

Loyalty pressure rarely announces itself. It arrives first as a feeling like a tightening in the chest, a sudden self-censorship, the urge to go quiet at the dinner table or in the comments section. When you notice that feeling, treat it as a signal, not an instruction.

Start with three questions you ask yourself, privately, before you say or do anything:

Who is actually asking for my loyalty here? Is it a person you love? A community that shaped you? Or is it an institution, a party, an algorithm designed to make you feel like a traitor for thinking? The answer matters.

What am I afraid will happen if I don’t comply? Real loyalty doesn’t usually arrive with a threat attached. Fear is worth examining. It often points to exactly where the manipulation is hiding. Is it criticism? Being wrong?

What would I say if I wasn’t afraid? You don’t have to say it out loud yet. Just notice it. Write it down if you need to. The practice begins in your own mind, long before it reaches the world.

Then, if you have someone you trust like a friend, a partner, a sibling, try saying the complicated thing out loud. Not to convince them. Not to win. Just to speak it. Loyalty traps thrive in silence, and one honest conversation, even a short and fumbling one, is a small act of resistance.

In arguments or group discussions, try replacing what is your position on? with what are you learning about this situation? It is a quieter question, but it opens more doors. Underneath most loyalty conflicts is a fear of abandonment, of being wrong, of betraying someone you love. When you de-fang the fear together, the trap loses some of its power.

None of this requires you to solve geopolitics. It just asks you to stay honest with yourself, which, right now, is harder and more important than it sounds.

In a deeply connected world, loyalty is not a wall it’s a bridge. It allows us to say: I love my country and I can see when it is wrong. I stand with my people and I stand with yours.

That is not weakness. That is the most rigorous kind of strength there is.

I lied earlier. The day I became a Canadian citizen, my grandfather didn’t stand next to me, in fact he couldn’t stand without assistance anymore. When it came time to be pinned with the maple leaf he couldn’t approached the bench of the judge like others did, that was the rule. So the judge got up and left his seat. He came down to the center of the room, and he found my grandfather there and put the maple leaf on him.

That’s where my loyalty lies. Yes, to a flag, to a country that gave me an extraordinary life. But most of all, my loyalty is pinned to the man or woman, who abandons the rules and meets others in the middle of the room.

The Conscioushood newsletter is an exploration of humanity and character in modern contexts and the shared wisdom that unites us all.

There are some new people here so I thought it might be a good time to reconnect with the origins of this project that I began almost three years ago.

I started my career in journalism with what I’ll admit is a slightly naive but deeply held belief: that people, when given good information, generally choose good. That we move, however imperfectly, however slowly, toward our own betterment.

I still believe that.

Well, mostly.

But after more than a decade of watching how information moves through the world, and how often it doesn’t translate into anything resembling wisdom or action, I started asking a different question. Not what are people missing, but what in us converts information into something useful?

Here’s what I mean. Think about the sheer volume of information available to any of us right now, more than at any point in human history. More than when I started school, more than when I started reporting, more than most of us can reasonably process in a lifetime. We have professional grade access to knowledge about politics, climate, the military, space science, biochemistry. All of it, at our fingertips, at all hours.

And yet.

We are not proportionally wiser. We are not proportionally better at solving the problems in front of us. The information is not the bottleneck. Something else is.

What I’ve come to believe, is that the system inside us responsible for converting information into action is our character. Not character in some abstract, or pious sense. I mean the actual infrastructure of who we are: the architecture of our values, the physical way those values show up in our bodies and our choices and our relationships. The operating system through which everything we learn gets filtered, processed, and either acted on or abandoned.

That’s what I’m interested in. That’s what I’ve always been interested in, even when I didn’t have the language for it.

There’s something else, too. Something I think about a lot as someone who has watched technology reshape how information reaches people.

When we turn to our phones instead of each other, we do more than just change how we acquire information. We change how we learn it.

For most of human history, we made meaning through conversation. Not through transmission, not by someone downloading knowledge into us, but through the back-and-forth of genuine exchange, the kind of dialogue where both people walk away having discovered something they couldn’t have reached alone. Think of a librarian who knows your reading habits and recommends something off-piste. A professor who pushes back on an assumption. A mentor who asks the question you weren’t expecting. A friend who holds up a mirror.

That two-way process is not a soft skill. It is the mechanism through which humans have made their most important discoveries. The loss of it is not a minor inconvenience. It’s a structural deficit at exactly the moment we can least afford one.

Because here’s where we are: the information coming at us right now is like a fire hose. And the problems we’re trying to solve are a five-alarm fire. You can’t fight a fire like that without the strength to hold the hose steady. You can’t hold the hose steady without having done the work, consistently and deliberately, to build that strength.

That work is character. The skills of wisdom, patience to wait for good information, collaboration on issues we don’t agree on, a sense of responsibility to be careful about what we share and trust. That’s the muscle. And it needs exercise.

That’s not pessimism. It’s the opposite. I am genuinely, stubbornly optimistic about what we’re capable of. When I step back from the worst of any given news cycle and look at the actual arc of human history, what I see is relentless, imperfect, magnificent striving. Through the arts, through science, through technology, through every form of innovation our species has thrown at the problems in front of it, we have always been trying. We don’t always get it right. But we are wired to try.

And the evidence of that is the very tools we’re now debating how to use well. We built them. We can figure out how to hold them.

How We Process What We Know

I often land on the word metabolize when I talk about information converts into knowledge. It makes me think of how food converts into energy.

Digestion is a useful metaphor because it’s honest. What you eat and what your body actually absorbs are two different things. The same meal can nourish one person and wreck another, depending on their system, their state, the conditions under which they consumed it. Nutrition isn’t just about input. It’s about what your body does with what it receives.

So here’s a simple framework I come back to, three stages that, when we skip them, are exactly how information becomes noise or indigestion (to belabour the metaphor) instead of wisdom.

Stage 1: Ingestion — What are you actually taking in?

Before anything else, notice what you’re consuming and how. Not just the source, but the format, the volume, the pace. A headline is not an article. An article is not a briefing. A briefing is not understanding. Most of us are processing at the headline level and reacting at the understanding level and that gap is where a lot of our collective confusion lives.

The journalist’s instinct here is useful: What do I actually know, and what am I assuming? Apply it to your own intake. When you finish reading a story, can you state the core facts without the emotional charge of the framing? If not, you haven’t fully ingested it yet, you’ve just absorbed the temperature of it.

Try this: After reading a story that provokes a strong reaction, say out loud one sentence, just one, that states simply what it was actually explaining. No interpretation, no implication, no need to agree to disagree. What are the verifiable facts? That single sentence is the floor of your understanding. Everything else is analysis, and analysis requires a floor.

Stage 2: Digestion — What does this mean, and for whom?

This is the stage we most consistently skip, and its loss is most deeply felt.

Digestion requires time and friction. In the body, digestion is slow, involuntary, and happens largely without our awareness, if we eat in a rush there are consequences. The same is true of how we process meaning. We need to sit with information long enough to ask: what does this connect to that I already know? What does it challenge? What questions does it open that it doesn’t answer?

This is where conversation becomes essential, not just commenting, or re-sharing with your comments, but actual exchange with someone whose perspective creates friction with your own. This where a conversation with a teacher, a neighbour or a friend is priceless. Not to change your mind necessarily, but to complete the process. Digestion, in the human sense, was never meant to be a solo act.

Try this: Find one story per week that unsettled you (not the one that confirmed what you already believe, but the one that made you uncomfortable or confused) and make a point of bringing it up in conversation with someone. Not to debate it. Ask them to help you understand it together. Notice what you discover in the exchange that you couldn’t reach alone.

Stage 3: Output — What does this ask of me?

This is the question that our character answers.

After ingestion and digestion, something remains: a choice about what to do with what you now know. That choice is not always dramatic. It doesn’t always require action in the public sense. Sometimes the output is simply the quality of attention you bring to a conversation, the patience you extend to someone navigating the same story from a different vantage point, the decision not to forward something until you’ve completed stages one and two.

But output is where the work becomes real. It’s where information either turns into something useful. For you, for your community, for the people in your orbit. Or dissipates into the ambient noise of having-consumed-without-digesting that most of us are swimming in.

The question isn’t just what do I think about this? It’s what does this ask of me, in my actual life, with the people and circumstances I actually have?

Try this: At the end of a week of heavy news, ask yourself: what did I do with what I learned? Not in a punishing way but in a curious one. What moved from information into action, even small action? What is still sitting undigested? That audit, done honestly, is character work. That’s the muscle.

This newsletter exists as a space to work through this rapid evolution we are all experiencing together, to explore how our humanity shows up in the world as it actually is right now. Not in some ideal form, not in some utopia we’re building toward. In this world, with its contradictions and its grief and its absurdity and its genuine beauty. In our classrooms and our newsrooms and our dinner tables and our work teams and our neighborhoods.

If you found your way here through my journalism, you know I’ve spent years trying to surface truth in complex situations. This is an extension of that work, just further upstream. It asks not only what’s happening, but what in us determines how we understand it, and how we will choose to respond to it.

If you’re new to this project entirely: welcome. I mean that without ceremony. The stakes have never been higher, but our resources have never been better. And I believe, down to the bone, that we are not only capable of meeting this moment. We were built for it.

We are the end result of tens of thousands of years of adaptation and endurance and ingenuity that has brought us here to exactly this moment, with exactly what we need.

I have never wavered on that belief.

Well, mostly.

-maryam

We trust our phones to navigate cities we once would have learned to walk by instinct. We trust algorithms to recommend what to read, what to watch, what to do or say on a date. Increasingly, we trust machine learning to interpret the world faster and more accurately than our own minds and the relationship is becoming unbalanced.

Recent global surveys show trust in traditional institutions is fragile. At the same time, studies indicate that people are more likely than ever to defer to algorithmic decision-making even when it contradicts their own assessment. We are rapidly slumping into a posture of learned dependency.

The metaphor that keeps returning to me is simple: technology is a powerful horse. But we have begun to forget that we are meant to hold the reins: I am supposed to be the rider. The horse should not ride me.

This is not a rejection of technology. I have spent my career reporting on conflict, displacement and political upheaval. I know the power of digital tools to document injustice, counter censorship and connect the isolated. Artificial intelligence, predictive modelling and networked communication are extraordinary achievements.

But something deeper is happening beneath the surface of innovation. Even as we grasp new advancements in our hands, we loosen our grip on the evolutionary intelligence that brought us here in the first place.

For thousands of years, human beings survived famine, war, migration and plague without machine learning models. We adapted. We cooperated. We developed moral codes, instincts and shared rituals that reinforced the skills necessary for survival: courage, restraint, reciprocity, responsibility. These were not abstract virtues, niceties for polite society, but practical technologies of survival and cohesion.

Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists increasingly argue that our greatest advantage as a species was not brute strength but cooperation. We became dominant not because we were the fiercest, but because we were the most collaborative. We survived because we trusted one another enough to share food, labour and information.

Now, having reached summits our ancestors could not have imagined, we have begun to outsource our most basic sense-making. The youngest among us are growing up watching adults reflexively reach outward for answers. We Google before pausing long enough to search our own memory. We consult influencers (often paid per post) before we might ask a friend. We scroll to avoid sitting in the silence that might be filled with uncertainty or thought. The message is subtle but consistent: the answers lie elsewhere.

Three years ago, the US surgeon general described loneliness as an epidemic. Since then, national surveys in the UK show roughly one in four young adults now experiences a common mental health condition, a sharp increase compared with a decade earlier. Correlation is not causation. But it is difficult to ignore the coincidence: as our digital connectivity intensifies, our inner and communal resilience appears to weaken.

Part of what we have lost is character education.

By character education, I do not mean religion or doctrine. I mean the cultivation of interior life, an understanding that we possess conscience, discernment and responsibility. Historically, many communities received this formation in churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, or in philosophical gatherings where figures like Socrates challenged citizens to examine their lives.

Across civilisations, the language is consistent: The I Ching described the junzi, the “superior person,” who acts with deliberation, listens deeply and corrects the self before correcting others. The Popol Vuh, the K’iche’ Maya sacred text, warned against pride and elevated cooperation over brute force. These are not ornamental ideas, they are civic instruction.

Gathering in places where such virtues are named and practised is in decline. We may once have sat (even distractedly) listening to sermons about humility in waiting your turn, generosity toward neighbours, patience in listening, courage in speaking. But crucially, these lessons were embodied. On our way home, we might have enacted them in queues, in crowds, in small acts of community.

Today, we are educated in isolation. We consume content alone. We argue one-directionally in comment sections, alone. We are mentored by feeds curated to mirror our existing beliefs. Our interactions with chatbots simulate intimacy without requiring reciprocity.

Meanwhile, an ever-widening berth is cleared between us: a frictionless digital road where you will never wonder whether to let the harried person behind you go ahead in line, because no one is waiting. Your AI agent has automated the errand. The result is a kind of emotional malnutrition. We consume calories of information, but they are not metabolised into shared meaning or wisdom through exercise.

Human beings were not designed to operate as self-contained nodes in an endless stream of personalised data. We have always learned in communion. We corrected one another. We were accountable to faces, family and reputation, not avatars.

The imbalance with technology is not primarily a technical problem. It is a developmental one. If we do not cultivate inner authority and shared responsibility, we will inevitably hand that authority to systems optimised for engagement rather than human flourishing.

Even leaders in the technology sector acknowledge this. Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei recently argued that the humanities and human skills will be “more important than ever.” Companies increasingly seek communicators with emotional intelligence, curiosity and compassion, qualities machines cannot replicate.

We do not need to be made great again. As a species, we have always been extraordinary. The capacity for moral imagination, for collective action, for self-sacrifice in the name of something larger, these are not features of silicon or circuitry. We have demonstrated them in town squares, in living rooms and in complex artistry for millennia.

The path forward is not to smash the machines, nor to retreat from modern life. It is to remember that every tool in our hands is exactly that: a tool. The horse is powerful. But it was never meant to choose the direction. Reclaiming the reins means investing again in the slow disciplines of character and community. It may mean returning to shared spaces, secular or sacred, where we practise being human together. Machines may join us, but they should sit quietly, until called upon.

Reclaiming moral authority means teaching children not only how to navigate technology safely, but how to remain in charge of it. Not only how to search, but how to discern. Not only how to produce more efficiently, but to care to learn for curiosity’s sake alone.

Technology will continue to evolve. The question is whether we will evolve with equal intention.

We are not obsolete.

We are not inadequate.

We are at the precipice of a powerful internal upgrade, if we choose it. We are riding a very powerful horse, but a powerful rider can steer it.

We all want the benefits of community, but we also know that it means putting into that space in order to partake of it and often we either don’t know how to do that, or we don’t have the bandwidth to try.

And what if it doesn’t work out?
What if we go to the effort of organizing something and no one shows up, or it never quite takes off, or we don’t actually end up enjoying it?

This is totally normal. This will likely happen. You are not imagining your feelings of burnout or the fear of taking on more in the hope that something good will come of it.

So breathe those feelings in.
Look at them.
Now ask them to sit down and put their feet up — we’re going to handle this together because ironically, when we are most burnt out — that’s when we are most in need of community.

The Antidote

Here’s what we need to remember:

1. Don’t be a hero.

It can be two people you already see at a workout class, chatting before it starts.
Community-building is simply asking if they want to grab a coffee after class — and making it a regular thing. We don’t need heroes here, we just need a shared caffeine addiction we are willing to admit to.

And if you ask this time and they can’t because they are busy, be a hero, a super brave hero and try again next week.

“Our smoothie before workout group started with just one other mom struggling with her body postpartum; then another one joined us. Soon we were five and running to remember to get class on time. Soon we were having post-workout lunches with our class teacher, who started giving little masterclasses on nutrition and routine-building while we ate (turns out all the smoothies weren’t helping us). That group became the backbone of my first very isolating years of motherhood.”

2. Make Excuses or Make Your Problems Everyone Else’s Problems

Be needy. Be the one who says, “I need help.” You’re giving others permission to do the same. Let’s just all stop the pretense that we aren’t all desperately in need of help. Find an excuse to pull people into your orbit.

“At the school bus stop one morning I pretended like I had a huge issue with all the costumes the school asks us to produce for dress-up-like-your-favourite this or that days. It’s not that bad really, I just wanted an excuse to connect to parents in the neighbourhood. So I suggested a costume-sharing WhatsApp group and offered to let people join. People were thrilled to know they might be able to rely on it one day. It’s now evolved into a “sharing cough syrup when the pharmacy is closed” and “meeting up at the park every Friday for grown up talk while kids play” group.

Extra Reading: The Economist has a great piece this week on the lost art of speaking to strangers.

3. Don’t go anywhere new.

If you’re already walking, hiking, or doing something regularly, extend the circle.
Invite others. Rotate who chooses the route. Keep it simple. Just keep it consistent.

“When we moved to Singapore, we joined a family hiking group. We rotated who chose the route — then someone made T-shirts, then someone else made a book for kids to track total kilometers hiked. Now we are a massive group and we order a a big meal to eat after that everyone chips in to pay for. We eat it sitting in the mud and feeling awesome. It’s a whole thing.”

4. Don’t be too good at anything.

A community is the sum of its parts. You don’t have to do everything, do what comes easy to you and ask others to do the rest or drop the parts that are weighing everyone down.

“I am part of a high-intensity book club — themed decor, food related to the book, and conversation that is tied to the themes of the book. When I first joined it seemed daunting. I’m a bit older, I find all the messaging to organize tiresome. But my home is big (the younger members have roommates and limited seating) so I offer the space. The ones who are good at the apps handle the messaging, others handle decor and making theme specific quiche or filling us up with snacks. It works beautifully because everyone contributes in the way they can. I live for this group it’s the highlight of the month, along with all the memes.”

This is how communities thrive: when people give what comes naturally to them and allow others to do the same.

5. Sometimes the community that exists sucks. Join it anyway.

One of the reasons most cited for a reflexive aversion to building community are previous experiences with religious groups or cultural groups that we were dragged to and didn’t fit in. But we forget, we might not be the only ones feeling that way.

“I joined a large philosophy meetup that often felt overstimulating. It was in a big restaurant, it was noisy, there was always someone who talked the whole time. I felt exhausted after but I kept going. I met a few interesting people there just waiting for our cabs home after who loved movies and plays, so we formed a smaller group. We go to festivals, or watch films from home and discuss the philosophical issues that come up on WhatsApp. This lets a member who is physically house-bound participate, as well as a member who struggles to get a babysitter. For all of us it works because it is smaller, quieter, and more sustainable — and it helps us stay connected to the larger group, too.”

6. Don’t get excited.

Community isn’t built overnight and you don’t know what moment will turn a gathering into Community with a capital C.

“Our little local theater chat group became a real community after our city suffered catastrophic flooding.

We stopped talking about plays and started coordinating help. Some found housing for displaced families; others took in pets or bought supplies. We even launched a ‘meals-for-volunteers’ initiative that helped local cafés rebuild by prepaying them. I couldn’t go physically to help but I bought rubber boots and shovels for the people who were going.

Service bonded us. Powerlessness turned into purpose — and that’s when we realized we were no longer carrying it all alone. Now we regularly eat at the restaurants we supported and have a lifetime’s supply of inside jokes about mud.”

The Lesson

A community starts with one person — someone willing to pull others into their orbit.
By finding excuses, by keeping it simple, by letting people offer as little or as much as they can.

Yes, community is messy. It’s mismatched WhatsApp groups, half-eaten snacks, and someone always forgetting the thing they promised to bring.

Most of what looks like community is just people fumbling toward each other one message, one moment, one lukewarm coffee at a time.

So here’s your challenge for the week:
Be the person who starts something tiny.
Invite one person for coffee, or a walk, or to join a local lego or puzzle swap.
Tell them you’re conducting a very serious experiment in micro-community-building.

Take a breath.
Send the text.
Ask the question.
Start the thread.

And if all else fails, offer snacks.
Everyone likes snacks.

Reflection Prompt:
What’s one place you already go regularly and one person you could invite to share a small moment of connection there this week?

And they likely turned to you and asked, “Why are people fighting?”

Or maybe they didn’t ask at all, but you’ve seen it in their body, their play, the way that they are listening in, that they might have questions.

I’ve spoken to hundreds of students around the world while I was reporting from places of war who all felt nervous to ask me hard questions, but who all wanted , deeply, to understand in a meaningful way the world they live in. In a time when the world feels full of conflict, confusion, and collective grief, the question isn’t whether to talk to our children about what’s going on. The question is how.

How do we speak honestly without overwhelming?

How do we protect their innocence, their sense of safety without betraying their trust that we will always be truthful to them?

How do we raise children who are not only informed, but compassionate, resilient, and optimistic?

At Conscioushood™, we believe children need truth-telling paired with soul-tending.

What this looks like:

• Speak with clarity, not fear. Admit to them that it is complicated and difficult to explain but that some of the most important realities of their life will feel that way sometimes. Admit that you don’t know everything but that you are trying to learn more and that you can share what you know. Children can handle truth when it is offered with calm, loving presence.
  

• Anchor in your family’s values. Use the language of character—justice, courage, empathy, patience—to frame hard topics.
  

• Make room for emotion and ideas and rambling. Allow them to talk through their ideas and feelings. They might want to tell you about how they would fix it if they could. This is wonderful, preserving their sense of powerfulness in the world is priceless, feelings of powerlessness do the most harm. These conversations are where they can practice their voice and learn their own ideas about the world.
  

Try This at Home: “The Character Compass” Conversation:

When a difficult world event arises, try this 5-minute check-in

1. Ask what they’ve heard and what they don’t understand about what they heard. (for example, “Have you heard anything about what’s happening in the world this week?”

Let them speak. Don’t rush to correct or inform, just listen:

“Some kids were saying there is a ceasefire? That ______ (insert one side) is evil and doing terrible things. But now they’ve been forced to stop. So ______ (insert one side) won! That’s good right?”

This is where you can let them know what you know and what you don’t know:

“This term means that there is an agreement to stop fighting. There are not always two sides or two armies, sometimes one side has more weapons than the other, and even if they didn’t start the fight, a lot of innocent people can get hurt and it is wrong for people to get hurt on either side. Sometimes, many people are involved in a war, some are giving weapons, some are giving money, some are using their words and spreading negative ideas that keep the fight going. But now all of them have to stop and try to find a solution that doesn’t involve destruction. We hope that this will work. But it’s only the beginning because we want a world where this never happens again to anyone.”

2. Invite strength and character in: Ask you kids what skills are needed in stopping a fight. Invite them to think about how empathy, justice, wisdom and caring can play a role in solving problems.

“What character might we need to understand this better?” Empathy? Courage? Patience? Justice?

People who use our Character Cards bring their cards out for this and use the card’s message as a guidepost for the conversation. For example, this is the message for Justice: We can stand up for what’s right with courage and kindness, for ourselves, for others, and for the truth. Invite a discussion around this idea of justice.

3. Remind them they have power, today:

You are not too small to make a difference. You can make a difference for someone today. Do you want to come up with a way to add our voice to this situation?

4. Reassure them:

Even when hard things happen in the world, we are here together. You are safe and you have the skills and knowledge to navigate this. And you can always talk to me.

A Message for the Adults

You do not need to have all the answers. You only need to be honest, present, and emotionally available.

If your own heart is heavy, let it be. Tell them you find it hard. Let your children see that strength can include tears, that you feel sadness when others are in pain. Let them learn that courage can coexist with care. Today, I continue to work on the issues of the world in my work and some days I can hardly get out of bed. I feel like a terrible parent for letting my feelings overwhelm me. I invite my children in and share what’s happening to me, my feelings of powerlessness, how I recover, and how I get back up and keep going. Often they offer ways to lift my spirits, like reconnecting with nature or they bring me a strong cup of coffee and a hug.

This is how we raise not just informed children but conscious citizens of the world.

Reflection Prompt

You might try this with your journal or around your dinner table:

What character do I most need this week to respond to the world with integrity?

(Justice? Wisdom? Perseverance?)

How might I help nurture that same character in the children around me? How can I invite them to share their light with others and remind them that their light recharges me in hard times?

Some Resources to Support You

• “You can and should talk to your children about war” — Conscious Childhood
  This is a simple step-by-step guide we created that we shared on our social media at Conscious Childhood to help you have compassionate and empowering conversations with your youngest family members about conflict in the world.

• Do Gooders Podcast - Episode 155: How to talk to your kids about war” Kelly Rodriguez, LMFT, speaks with the host about how constant exposure to distressing news affects children and how caregivers can navigate discussions of conflict, trauma, and uncertainty.

• “Here is how to talk to your children about conflict and war” — UNICEF
  A very accessible, globally minded guide for caregivers. Emphasizes starting with what they know, staying calm and age‑appropriate, nurturing compassion over blame, highlighting helpers, and ongoing conversation.
  

From Our Family to Yours

We know it’s not easy, but we are walking this road beside you.

Let’s keep building a world where children grow up rooted in truth, resilience, and loving connection one heart at a time.

With care,

Maryam & Howard

Co-founders of Conscioushood™

If this note helped you, please forward it to a friend, a teacher, or a fellow parent. We want to support families who are raising humans in a world that can feel very inhumane at times.

You can also subscribe or share via social to help us reach 5,000 conscious households by the end of 2025.

Have you ever felt like the whole world is talking about the same thing?

Your feed pulses with urgency, you feel outrage for what everyone is clearly seeing, solidarity around the causes everyone is now also caring about too. Everyone seems to care about the same issues you care about, fear the same future you fear, and is nodding along to the same affirmations you share.

It can feel empowering. The world’s complex issues can even feel comforting.

If this sounds familiar, you might be experiencing a sense of false consensus.

There is an unsaid truth beneath the digital scroll: the sense that “everyone agrees” is often a mirage. It’s not shaped by collective insight, but by algorithms that reward sameness and reward rage. We live in a time where technology curates our consciousness, where agreement is not evidence of truth, but often the result of highly targeted reinforcement.

This phenomenon, what psychologists call false consensus bias, is deepened by the digital echo chambers we inhabit. These feedback loops distort our perception of the world and fracture our ability to relate to those outside our curated consensus.

And when we confuse algorithmic popularity with universal truth, we lose touch with the richness of difference, the nuance of human experience, and the complexity of real community. The very act of vulnerability involves extending to another person the possibility to reject your words or your reality, and when they choose not to, to show curiosity or compassion instead, something transformative happens, it’s a moment of connection and evolution for both of you.

In full honesty, I fell into this very trap in last week’s newsletter, “Everyone’s Talking About Character… Here’s What They’re Missing.”

I opened with: “Lately, everyone, from HR managers to headmasters, influencers to policymakers, seems to be talking about character.”

And it did feel that way. For weeks, it felt like character education was everywhere I looked. But the more honest reflection is this: my feed was reflecting me, my passion, my recent clicks, my focus. It wasn’t a window into a universal conversation… it was a mirror.

Your feed might be full of new workout regimens. Someone else’s might be about post-surgery pain relief.

This is why we have to work harder to rehumanize how we see one another. To reach beyond our curated scrolls and into the discomfort and beauty of the real world, messy, divergent, layered with truths that don’t always match our own.

Social media won’t do this work for us. But conscious, compassionate presence will.

In our Connected Conversations kits and character tools, we teach children and adults alike how to practice empathy, honesty, and the kind of patience that makes space for others’ lived realities. Not just the ones that trend, but the ones that get ignored. Not just the voices that echo ours, but the ones that challenge or change us.

This month, we invite you to:

• Sit with someone who doesn’t see the world as you do. Ask more questions than you answer.
  

• Reflect on where your “information diet” may be narrowing your empathy, track it if you have to, look at your feed with the eye of an anthropologist and examine where you might be getting a false sense of consensus.
  

• Use the Character Cards to explore virtues like humility, consideration, and wisdom in your family or classroom.
  

• Remember: what is popular is not always what is true. And what is true may never go viral.
  

Let’s reconnect with the quiet majority, the unspoken stories, the unheard needs, the untrending truths.

With love,

Maryam

Co-Creator of Conscioushood™

Character in kids. Character in CEOs. Character in culture.

It’s having a moment.

But here’s what’s being missed in this so-called “character revival”:

Character isn’t a performance. It’s a practice. It’s an eco-system of specific skills. And it’s relational.

In too many spaces, character is still being reduced to a checklist of personal traits, a box-ticking exercise in individual achievement. But the truth is, character isn’t built in a vacuum. It’s shaped through connection, nurtured in community, and refined in the crucible of lived experience, especially the messy, human kind. It’s not just emotional intelligence or mindfulness.

As we see it at Conscioushood™, character is not a static set of virtues to possess; it’s a dynamic way of being in the world.

Take a look at this stat:

“70% of U.S. adults say people’s inability to get along with others is a major problem”

This isn’t just about politics. It’s about practice. It’s about whether we’re cultivating the emotional muscles to connect across difference, to show up with integrity, to lead with empathy not just in moments of ease, but in moments of tension.

The most misunderstood concept in leadership today?

That character is soft.

That it’s sentimental.

That it’s something you have rather than something you do.

But anyone who’s ever navigated a moral crossroads knows this: character is courageous.

It’s disruptive. It calls you to something higher, especially when it’s inconvenient.

We need to reimagine character as an ecosystem of skills:

Perseverance isn’t just grit. It’s moral endurance.

Empathy isn’t just listening. It’s social vision.

Responsibility isn’t just obligation. It’s bridge building.

This is why spent years developing tangible tools like our Character Cards and “Connected Conversations” series before we even began posting or writing about character. Because children and adults need tools to practice essential virtues that build belonging, not just a list of behaviors to perform.

Character-driven leadership isn’t about charisma or self-control.

It’s about coherence. Alignment. Integrity-in-motion.

Everyone’s talking about character. But if we’re not talking about how it’s practiced in relationships, communities, and systems, then we’re missing the point.

Let’s take this beyond trends, let’s go deeper. Let’s talk about character as a timeless, intergenerational craft.

In a world that moves fast and often fractures our attention, you’ve arrived at a place that invites you to slow down, just enough to remember who you are, and who we are together.

Welcome to conscioushood™, our weekly letter of reflection, research, and most of all, remembering what we already know. We’re so glad you’re here.

We (Maryam and Howard) began this journey not as experts, but as seekers—travelers, parents, and fellow humans navigating a world that feels both breathtaking and broken.

As individuals building our careers we both lived and worked across cultures, from classrooms and conflict zones to boardrooms and backyards. And everywhere we’ve gone, we’ve seen one thing clearly: the health of a society depends on the depth of its character.

Now for a little bit more about where we are coming from, we will introduce each other:

Howard: Maryam Ishani Thompson is a Columbia University graduate in education, specializing in curriculum development for communities in emergency zones. From her work at the United Nations Security Council on programs to stabilize societies fractured by war, to her years reporting from Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, and Iran for some of the most respected news compnaies in the world, Maryam has dedicated her life to understanding resilience and rebuilding in the face of conflict. Her storytelling and analysis have been cited by the US Congress, the Parliament of France, and shared and reshared globally online, offering insight into what keeps communities strong in the face of catastrophic threats.

Maryam *clears her throat*: Howard Thompson is a veteran of global advertising and marketing, having shaped campaigns for some of the world’s most recognized brands, including Nike, Adidas, and Land Rover. Having lived and worked across cultures, he spent years translating meaning and connection into storytelling that resonated across languages and borders. Today, he has turned his focus to something deeper: nurturing the essential character traits that build true community, not between companies and consumers, but between human beings.

This newsletter is our way of sharing what we’ve learned, what we’re questioning, and what we’re creating.

Each week, we’ll explore one essential theme from patience to justice, from responsibility to joy, through the lens of global philosophy, spiritual insight, Indigenous wisdom, and lived experience. We’ll offer questions for reflection, stories to stir the heart, and tools to practice in your daily life. Some issues will feature excerpts from our Character Card Decks or Connected Conversations series; others may be short meditations or longform essays.

This is not just a newsletter. It’s a rhythm. A weekly invitation to build the inner world that shapes the outer one.

We believe:

— Character is not taught once. It is practiced always.

— Connection is not a luxury. It is how we survive.

— Technology can distract us, but it can also deliver us, back to each other, with the right intentions.

So here’s our intention: to walk with you, gently and honestly, as we rediscover what it means to live with courage, compassion, and consciousness.

We’re just getting started.

Thank you for being part of the beginning,

Maryam & Howard

Founders of conscioushood™

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