As the Arabian caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattab wrote, “He who does not live in the way of his beliefs starts to believe in the way he lives.”

Something I’ve noticed about humans is that they tend to value each other in proportion to how rare other people are. They’re unfriendliest in the most densely populated areas, like in the centres of big cities (and on social media). And they’re friendliest in the least populated areas, like in remote rural communities.

region-beta paradox—the tendency for humans to only improve their situation when things get sufficiently bad