A Polaroid of Humanity: 2025 humanity reflection

An end of year reflection on belonging to community, protecting attention, and reducing noise in 2026

Humanity reflection: This is a Polaroid from the Humanity Hub Community Drinks, the final gathering of 2025. It is a small square of light on a dark table, and somehow it manages to sum up a whole year.

I started 2025 thinking I was making work about climate, social injustice, and environmental collapse. But as the months unfolded, everything kept circling back to one simpler word.

Humanity.

And I do not mean this as an abstract idea, but the lived thing. Like the look I saw in someone’s eyes when they finally felt heard. That awkward courage of showing up to something outside my comfort zone. The fatigue I hear people say they feel in their bodies when they realise the systems around us are not working for everybody.

This is my humanity reflection, and if 2025 had one message for me, it would be this.

A lot of people are waking up to a world that looks very different to the one they thought they were living in.

Humanity Reflection: The year in one sentence

2025 was the year I watched peace become a dirty word, while fear became the default language of public life.

Discussing militarisation became the norm, while discussing peace felt controversial.

I noticed urgency replacing context, and certainty replacing curiosity. I also noticed how quickly people can be pushed into camps, repeating lines that feel ready made, even when the topic has never touched their daily lives at all. Something I am finding very frightening.

And I want to also name this honestly. I am seeing this from my corner of the world, and I will get things wrong, but I cannot unsee the pattern. I also catch it in myself, especially when I am tired.

Echo chambers and the performance of openness

During my humanity reflection of this year, I realised I watched more and more spaces of discussion become echo chambers, circling the same conversations we have been having for years. Right when I had hope this would be a year of change.

Spaces that claim to be open to everyone, but carry little diversity, and have no real capacity to hold opposing or challenging voices.

And I kept feeling a tension with the City of The Hague. The marketing can be loud, positioning the city as the ‘International City of Peace and Justice’. But the actions of the city toward its own people can feel softer than the loudness of that message.

I say this as someone who wants the city to succeed at its own promise, not as someone rooting against it. If we cannot hold complexity, we cannot build trust. And if we cannot build trust, we cannot respond to the scale of what is happening.

“I will not outsource my humanity to fear, comfort, or silence. I will practise it, with others, in public.”

A sentence that tightened my body

At the opening of the Just Peace Festival, the Mayor of The Hague said something along the lines of, there are more roads to peace than military and defence. This worries me. The sentence still held militarisation inside it, as if it remains the default frame we orbit around.

I know the world hurts and heals at different speeds, and there are real threats. And the ‘West’ has a lot to answer for. Still, it hit me hard.

Maybe English is not his first language. Maybe he did not read his notes word for word. But in a position like that, with that kind of influence, words matter. And when I later read his published remarks from the opening, the framing was even clearer. [3] Resilience was named as military, but also as protecting an open and democratic society, and the freedom to enrich each other with different views, norms, and values.

That sentence echoed in my ears. I literally noticed my body tighten and my stomach turn.

My survival mechanism is being tuned to the smallest context. And when the smallest context shifts, it tells you something about the bigger story.

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The moment I felt the label land

I also remember the morning of Party 4 Peace, when I was due to speak.

Someone sent me a link to an official government page. [1] On it, the phrase left wing extremist appeared in a way that shocked me.

What shocked me was how that kind of language can become broad, casual, or politically useful. [2]

It can shrink the space for honest conversation. It can make people afraid to talk about migration, housing, racism, or power, even when those are real issues shaping real lives. I see this every day in my neighbourhood.

I felt compelled to add a last minute paragraph to my speech because I could feel how fast the ground was moving under our feet.

What 2025 taught me about attention

One thing for sure this year taught me was the art of listening. Not listening to reply, to steer, or with an agenda. But listening long enough for the real thing to arrive.

I learned that attention is not just personal. Attention is political.

When we protect attention, we protect nuance, relationship, and truth. When we lose attention, we become easier to move with fear.

I used to think my job was to get the facts right, to say the thing clearly, to help people connect the dots. This year I learned that facts and details rarely move people on their own. People change through being met. Through trust. Through time. Through a space where they can feel safe enough to let something real in.

And the hard part is this. Sometimes people do not want to be met. Sometimes they are not ready. Sometimes they are protecting something. That is difficult to sit with when so much is urgent, and we already feel behind.

“One of the hardest lessons of 2025 was how quickly violence becomes normal, and how easily silence becomes habit.”

But if I want change that lasts, I cannot just push harder into the noise. I have to protect attention, hold complexity, and build spaces where people can arrive in their own time.

It is weird, and I am not sure how to explain this, but my body tells me when language is closing a door instead of opening one.

What I stopped doing, or am trying at least

I stopped trying to be instantly responsive.

I am trying to stop living in reaction mode.

I am trying to stop letting urgency bully my nervous system into constant motion.

And it is hard. But planting seeds for a better future requires things the modern world keeps trying to erase.

Slowness. Planning. Structure. The courage to think ahead.

I have become tired of witnessing, and unwittingly having, knee jerk reactions to a constant flow of drama.

Belonging, not just building

This year I realised something we have circled for a long time.

It is not only about building community.

It is also about belonging to community.

A lot of what I do is not only about helping others. It is also about the human need for support, connection, reality checks, and a place to speak honestly. A place to listen, to be challenged, to be held, to laugh, to disagree, and still feel safe enough to stay.

When I strip everything back, this might be the simplest truth underneath the work.

I am not trying to manufacture community as a concept. I am trying to belong, and through Gregg the Artivist, to help others looking for belonging too.

Australia, belonging, and what I am fighting for

At the start of the year I spent an extended time back in Australia.

I touched nature again, properly, and felt what it did to my nervous system. The feeling of being small in huge wildness. Spectacular landscapes. Sunsets. Native animals. A slower pace.

It reminded me what I am fighting for.

And it sharpened a harder truth. Australia is my birthplace, but it is not my land. And I am sitting with the deeper truth under that sentence.

For people like me who are not First Nations, the ground we stand on was taken. That realisation does not resolve my question of belonging, but it does change the way I hold it. It makes me more careful with the word home, and more honest about what it means to arrive somewhere and be welcomed into relationship, rather than assume entitlement.

I felt the old question return. Where do I belong?

I came back to the Netherlands and dug my heels in deeper about what I stand for, and what kind of work I want to build next.

Grief and hope, side by side: 2025 humanity reflection

There was grief this year that I could not look away from.

A year of widely publicised wars, political unrest, and escalating tensions. Friends living inside consequences they did not choose. And the sense of the world watching, and too often failing to commit.

One of the hardest lessons of 2025 was how quickly violence becomes normal, and how easily silence becomes habit.

I also felt hope, not as a mood, but as a practice. Hope showed up through the communities I joined and helped build, from Climate Reality and Climate Fresk to local gatherings and neighbourhood work.

Each one of these moments reminded me.

There are people everywhere trying. Trying to understand. Trying to care without burning out. Trying to turn concern into something useful.

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Humanity reflection: Taking space, strengthening values

Right now I am taking a few days to sit and look back through the year as part of this Humanity reflection.

Photos. Posts. Content. Work. Creating space to reflect on my own humanity. My values. My principles. The ways I strengthen them. Standing up for what I believe in. Opening up to new information. Listening more than I speak.

This year I stood for those principles more publicly than ever. It has never felt more important, not in this rapidly changing landscape.

Humanity reflection and the true scale of what we are doing

This year also made it harder to deny the true extent of humanity’s impact.

On the planet. On each other. On all life.

It reminded me that everyday life is interconnected. That there is a literal domino effect to our actions.

What we fund. What we ignore. What we normalise. What we call inevitable.

What I am choosing in 2026

In 2026 I want to create space that is even more inclusive.

Space where we are not just talking in circles. Space where we listen to all perspectives, challenge ideas with care, and leave with a shared direction. Space that plants seeds.

Seeds of thought. Seeds of better futures. Seeds of actionable change.

This is not about adding more noise. It is about reducing noise. Finding the people who want to come on this journey with me. People who are tired of performance. People who are hungry for depth. People who want conversation that leads somewhere.

Of course I cannot promise perfect answers. But I can promise this.

I will keep showing up for the work of attention, honesty, and community.

A line to carry forward

I will not outsource my humanity to fear, comfort, or silence. I will practise it, with others, in public.

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This Polaroid is small.

But it holds something big. A reminder that beneath every headline, every policy failure, every algorithmic rage spiral, there are human beings looking for the same things. Safety. Dignity. Belonging.

If you are reading this and you feel the ache of 2025 in your bones, you are not alone.

If you want less noise, more truth, and spaces that can hold real conversation, I would love to hear from you.

If you want to help build these inclusive community spaces 2026, send me a message or come to the next session.

This Humanity Reflection for 2025 has been an interesting journey. What did 2025 teach you about humanity?

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Humanity Refection Sources:

1. NCTV, topic page: Links extremisme en dierenrechtenextremisme, nctv.nl
2. AIVD, topic page: Extremisme, aivd.nl
3. an van Zanen, Opening Just Peace Festival, published remarks, denhaag.nl, 11 June 2025

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