Growing up, I watched my dad and grandfather having many fierce debates over mainly poli-tical issues, and those debates left a deep imprint on me: Instead of understanding debates as an opportunity to exchange views and to learn from each other, I get overly emotional, and all I want to hear is I’m right.

“Discourse vulnerability” is what German law professor Frauke Rostalski calls this unfortunate habit of mine. In her book “The Vulnerable Society,” she describes how we as a society are becoming too sensitive, thus finding it increasingly more difficult to exchange ideas. Just talking about a certain topic can make us feel personally attacked. For example, if you are a gun owner, a transgender person, an immigrant, or someone working in the fracking industry, a debate over gun sales, biological sex, deportation, or non-fossil fuels can be perceived as a threat. Or sometimes the mere sight of a specific speaker is all it needs to evoke negative feelings. If that speaker has said hurtful things in the past, you won’t listen to them again. And if people are convinced to be morally on the right side — if they have “awakened” — they, too, likely won’t to listen to other perspectives.

“Awakening” is a term I encountered in veganism. When people suddenly see what suffering nonhuman animals endure in entertainment, medial research, factory farming, milk and egg production, they feel as if having “awakened,” and they don’t understand how other people can’t see the obvious. “Awakened” people tend to forget the time BEFORE they saw what now seems so crystal clear to them. This concept of having “awakened” can easily be applied to other issues: pro-choice vs. pro-life, transgender vs. traditional families, mass immigration vs. mass deportation, the amount of money and weapons given to Ukraine, etc. Once a person has “awakened,” their position becomes part of their identity, and those who raise critical questions are automatically labeled as “being against me.”

According to South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, humans anxiously try to avoid suffering at all cost. For every pain there’s a pill, and we’ve become terribly afraid of unpleasant challenges. Children grow up sheltered from any negative experiences life throws their way. When I was a child, losing a contest meant you actually lost it. Nowadays, even the child losing will win a prize. When I was a student, missing class three times meant being kicked out of class, as one of my classmates had to learn. Nowadays, professors are expected to accommodate students for missing class.

I’m the first to admit how much life’s messiness troubles me. But life is messy, whether we revolt or not, and part of that messiness is to sometimes get hurt and to not always get what we want. The answer to not seeing your favored political party win can’t be to claim fraud and respond with violence, or to cancel classes by putting your personal frustration over your responsibility toward your students. Instead, the answer to losing must be resilience.

Resilience is the critical ability we need to successfully deal with the messiness of life. When something doesn’t go our way, we either learn and grow from it, thus getting better equipped for future challenges, or we become depressed, bitter, and resentful, leading to more anger and divi-sion. In fact, our society now appears to be so afraid of “not-getting-what-I-want” that we don’t know how to talk with each other anymore. If you aren’t with me, you must be against me. — Is that really what we want our children to learn?

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings who base their decisions on reason rather than emotion. What truly guides us, however, is not reason but our values, and those values are absolutely tied to our emotions. Hand on heart, dear Reader: Why did you vote the way you did? Because you wanted to see your values protected: what’s important to you according to your worldview. And you’re happy your party won because you now see your values protected, and you’re upset you lost because the winning party doesn’t share your values.

The more vulnerable we are, as Rostalski notes, the more laws we want to protect our values: whether it’s gun rights, traditional family rights, transgender rights, or abortion rights. But of course protecting the one group’s values comes with restrictions for the other group. If there were stricter gun laws, the group opposing guns would feel more protected at the cost of those wanting to freely choose what gun(s) to purchase. Or excluding books featuring transgender or traditional families from libraries means restrictions to free expression and teaching children about different family models.

We need to learn to talk with each other again. A different opinion isn’t a personal attack but just another way of looking at the same issue. Because things are never just black and white, we absolutely need discourse. Discourse – hearing different perspectives and exchanging ideas — lies at the heart of the democratic spirit. Understanding that others also have fears and values they want to see protected, and us hearing those other fears and values — isn’t that what being human means? Diversity can never exist when listening only to those who agree with my values. Diversity means to respect variety and to compromise — which means leaving room for other perspectives and ideas.

Daniela Ribitsch teaches German at Lycoming College.