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Shamail Aijaz

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“So far I’ve been describing a process of getting to know someone as if we live in normal times. I’ve been writing as if we live in a healthy cultural environment, in a society in which people are enmeshed in thick communities and webs of friendship, trust, and belonging. We don’t live in such a society. We live in an environment in which political animosities, technological dehumanization, and social breakdown undermine connection, strain friendships, erase intimacy, and foster distrust. We’re living in the middle of some sort of vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis. It is as if people across society have lost the ability to see and understand one another, thus producing a culture that can be brutalizing and isolating.”

“There is no way to make hard conversations un-hard. You can never fully understand a person whose life experience is very different from your own. I will never know what it is like to be Black, to be a woman, to be Gen Z, to be born with a disability, to be a working-class man, to be a new immigrant or a person from any of a myriad of other life experiences. There are mysterious depths to each person. There are vast differences between different cultures, before which we need to stand with respect and awe. Nevertheless, I have found that if you work on your skills—your capacity to see and hear others—you really can get a sense of another person’s perspective. And I have found that it is quite possible to turn distrust into trust, to build mutual respect.”

“I decide to ask a question that’s been on my mind for months: “Why, when job searching could be totally rationalized by the Internet through a simple matching of job seekers’ skills to company needs, does everything seem to depend on this old-fashioned, face-to-face networking? After all, there’s going to be an interview anyway, right?” “It’s about trust,” Ron answers opaquely, not to mention “likability.” “The higher up you get in the exec ranks, the more things depend on being likable. You’ve got to fit in.” I catch my right hand advancing toward Ron’s untouched French fries and quickly revise the gesture into a reach for the salt. It’s distracting to think that our major economic enterprises, on which the livelihoods and well-being of millions depend, rest so heavily on the thin goo of “likability.”