Column
Change
Character
Psychology
4 min read

Look out for the outliers

Seeing the good qualities in others lifts them, benefits us, and makes the world better.
A office worker wearing headphones looks out of a hectic and loud office space around which people are moving
Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai

I was talking to someone the other day. She is a website developer and she’s just changed jobs. She is not a loud person, but anyone who meets her knows she is a person of quality, of depth and presence. She emanates a humble confidence. In her old job, she worked in a quiet, fairly sedate, office where she was given the space and the time to bring all her creativity to bear on whatever brief she was given. She was known and appreciated. 

But her new job – the job she started last week – is a bit different. Her new colleagues are loud and outspoken. Silence is unknown in their office. They like to work to a soundtrack. The drum and bass keep thumping, and the banter never stops flowing. She’s finding it hard to fit in with her new team. And things weren’t made any easier when, after a few days, her new boss took her aside for a pep talk.  

What was the problem? She was ‘too quiet’.  

It hurt to hear that. It broke my heart to think that anyone could be so blind. How shortsighted do you have to be, to view the grace and peace someone carries as a problem to be solved? In a world of distressing noise and clamour, she is precisely the kind of person every office needs to temper the insanity.  

I’m not worried about her. She’s bright and innovative. She’ll work it out. Either her new boss will see sense, or she’ll leave. And if she does, the queue of employers looking for someone just like her stretches round the block. She’ll be okay. 

But it got me thinking about the kind of psychology I study. In my research, she would be called an outlier.  One of those people in a team or a family who don’t quite fit in. Not because they are weird or awkward, but because they possess some positive quality the rest of the gang don’t have. They are the creative exuberant in a team who prefer doing things by the book. The hilarious joker in a pack who like to take things seriously. The conscientious worker trying to get on with the job in an office that would rather play now and work later. The kind one in a family of cutthroat competitors.

At the top of the list of reasons for wanting to leave work are the words: I am not appreciated.

The thing is we all have a unique contribution to make to the world, a one-off fingerprint of strengths and abilities never to be repeated in anyone else. In research these have been called Signature Strengths, the unique combination of positive qualities that make you you. And the weird thing is that we don’t have to try that hard to be them. If you are naturally kind, or wise, or grateful, or disciplined you won’t be able to stop yourself being that way. They come effortlessly to us. And if someone tries to stop us being the loving thoughtful faithful person we know ourselves to be, it is like losing a limb. If we find ourselves in a context where the most beautiful things about us are unwelcome – like my friend the website developer – it is like being rejected, right to the core.  

But here’s the cool thing. If we can live by our Signature Strengths – if we can wake up each morning and ask the question, how can I use my unique positive qualities in a new way today? – it leads to remarkable improvements in wellbeing. Multiple studies have shown that those who live like this, thinking about how they can bring what is best in them to the opportunities and obstacles of each day, report increased happiness in living. Not only that, but they also show reduced anxiety, stress and depression. It turns out being good is good for us. Who knew. 

That’s not the whole story though. To really be our best, we need other people to spot these strengths in us. If they don’t, we feel confined, unable to be ourselves in some way. When I ask people what it is like not to be able to bring their best qualities to the people around them, they come up with some pretty dark images. It is lonely, isolating, a desert, a fog, a prison, like being trapped in a cage. And when researchers ask people why they consider leaving their current job, their answers often reflect something like this. Work-life balance and salary are no doubt important, but often, at the top of the list of reasons for wanting to leave work are the words: I am not appreciated. Something good we wanted to give has not been received. We feel unseen. 

So that’s why I say: look out for the outliers. Who is it in your family, your workplace, your neighbourhood, who goes underappreciated? Who do you know who has something good to give, but needs some help to give it? Because if we can learn to see those invisible beautiful qualities in the people around us, we not only give them the joy of being known, we also invite more light and flavour into the world. Life becomes a little less grey. 

I just hope my friend’s new boss can learn this while he still has the chance. It is tough for her to feel so misunderstood, but it’s worse for him. She can move on, but he has to remain in an office deprived of the humble compassion she would have brought to it. It’s a question worth asking. What gift of beauty and goodness are we excluding from the world because we failed to see past the packaging? 

 

Article
AI
Culture
Digital
3 min read

Am I a project or a person?

What we lose when we AI tempts us to refuse our limits

Nathan is a Senior Researcher at the Theos think tank. .

A multiple exposure image shows a womans head and shoulders looking ahead, to the sides and above.
Alex Bracken on Unsplash

Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “godfather of AI,” was recently asked by a Financial Times journalist to consider a future in which human beings live among robots and gradually morph into cyborgs, their lives prolonged by artificial parts and chemical enhancements. His reply was strikingly casual: “What’s wrong with that?” Thankfully, his answer reflects a minority view today, but one that will grow significantly in both plausibility and appeal as the culture of Silicon Valley – animated by transhumanist ambitions and backed by enormous capital and influence – seeps into the ‘social imaginary’ of the West.  

In an individualist culture of ‘quantified selves,’ where self-optimization and wellbeing dominate the horizon of desire, it will take little to sell such enhancements, which will be promoted as not merely the means of surviving ‘rogue AIs’ but the way to flourishing. 

But this represents a profound distortion of what flourishing has meant across centuries of philosophical and theological reflection: the actualization of our true nature through the practice of virtue (Aristotle) and living in alignment with our proper end (telos), which is communion with God (Aquinas). Once tethered to a moral and spiritual vision of the human person, flourishing is fast becoming a runaway concept, thinned out on the anvil of individualism and moral autonomy, and conflated with the promise of expanding ad infinitum one’s capacities, choices, and life itself. It is precisely this  hyperindividualist vision that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has in mind when he speaks of his mission of enabling ‘maximal human flourishing’.  

But the ethical and anthropological crisis we are entering cannot be resolved by neuroscience, secular anthropologies, let alone economics alone, but only through engaging with Christian anthropology. At the heart of the Christian faith stands the claim that Jesus Christ is the archetypal human, the “second Adam,” in St Paul’s phrase. Not simply in the sense that he is a morally and spiritually exemplary figure whose ethical teaching we might want to consider. But, more boldly, in the sense that all human beings - past, present, and future - are mysteriously caught up, redeemed and fulfilled in the person of Christ. In his life, work, death, resurrection and ascension, humans are given the ultimate revelation not only of God, but also of what it means to be truly human and flourish. This means, among other things, that our limitations as creatures are not problems to be overcome but gifts to be honoured, the thresholds where God embraces us in grace. Our dependence and vulnerabilities are not defects to be corrected but the very conditions for fulfilling our humanity, in community, through the practices of faith (trust), hope, and love. 

Of course, there are distortions and privations that disfigure human life – disease, cruelty, injustice – which rightly summon humanity to acts of repair and resistance. As a product of God-given creativity, modern medicine and its many cures to previously fatal diseases is a huge blessing. But as biotechnology and AI continue to advance, the line between therapy and enhancement, healing and augmentation will likely become increasingly blurred. 

Against visions of human nature as infinitely plastic and of human beings as projects of self-invention, the Christian faith offers the liberating message that humanity is created, incorporated and will be fulfilled in Christ. To be human, then, is not to upgrade oneself without end to avoid vulnerability and death, but to be drawn into Christ, who died but was raised to life and glory. It is to find in him, and to practically outwork through His spiritual body, the Church, the measure of true, mutual flourishing, for the sake of the world. Only from this centre can we wisely discern how to receive and harness the gifts of technology without buying into its counterfeit promise of salvation. 

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