There is a growing exhaustion in public discourse. Not because the issues we face are trivial, but because the way we engage with them increasingly collapses complexity into camps.
Much of what circulates in the media — and especially on social platforms — rewards immediacy, certainty, and emotional charge. People respond not to the whole of what is being said, but to the part that resonates with their existing position. Within moments, a fragment is defended, attacked, and amplified, while the wider meaning is lost.
This is not accidental. Divided systems tend to favour confirmation over curiosity. Whether it is a newspaper, a broadcaster, or a social media feed, people gravitate towards narratives that reassure them that their way of seeing the world is the correct one. At scale, it is not only institutions that sustain division — it is us, the readers, listeners, and sharers.
What gets lost in this dynamic is understanding.
In my work with communities shaped by migration, historical rupture, and long-standing exclusion, I often see that the greatest barrier to support is not a lack of services or goodwill, but a mismatch in how meaning is made. Many people process experience relationally and historically, rather than through the individualised and linear frameworks that dominate institutional life.
When these ways of knowing are flattened or misread, people are not simply disagreed with — they are misunderstood. And being misunderstood at a human level erodes trust far more quickly than overt conflict.
This is why efforts that focus solely on visibility, representation, or correct language often reach a limit. Awareness matters. Naming harm matters. But awareness alone does not create relationship, and relationship is where repair actually happens.
We are living through a transition. The alarm has been sounded. What is now required is something quieter and more demanding: translation. The work of helping different ways of perceiving, interpreting, and responding to the world meet one another without accusation or collapse.
Translation does not mean agreement. It means slowing down enough to grasp what sits beneath a position — the loyalties, fears, histories, and values that shape how people make sense of reality. Without this, even the most well-intentioned systems end up talking past those they aim to serve.
Peace, if it comes at all, arrives over generations. It cannot be engineered through outrage or enforced consensus. What can happen now is a reduction in unnecessary harm — by resisting the pull towards simplification and choosing understanding over confirmation.
This is the quiet work I am committed to: creating spaces where complexity is allowed, where difference is met with curiosity, and where reconciliation is approached not as an outcome, but as a long, relational process.