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Friends,
After liberation from Auschwitz, Primo Levi encountered a civilian schoolteacher. The man didn’t offer pity. He didn’t ask questions about the camps. He didn’t treat Levi as a survivor, a victim, or a symbol.
He just talked to him. Just an ordinary conversation.
Levi wrote later that this moment mattered more than food. More than medicine. More than liberation itself. Because the teacher did something almost no one else could. He saw Levi as a person, not a category.
Not someone to be saved. Someone to be addressed.
My mum used to drum it into us. Say please and thank you. Not for the sake of it but for practice.
I have done the same with my kids now. When I see the manners slip, I stop and explain why gratitude matters. Not because the other person is owed anything. But because noticing is how we stay human. When I meet someone who genuinely doesn’t care about kindness or gratitude, I quietly choose not to build a relationship with them. That’s not judgment. It’s just recognition that we’re practicing different things.
We’re billions on this earth. Not everyone will notice you. That’s fine.
But you get to decide whether you notice them.
We tend to think of kindness as warmth. A feeling some people have more of than others. Emotional intelligence. A trait you’re born with or you’re not.
But watch the people who seem effortlessly kind and a different pattern emerges. They’re not feeling more than you. They’re noticing more. The slight hesitation before someone answers. The thing that wasn’t said. The person who hasn’t spoken.
Kindness is not a feeling. It is the trained capacity to recognise another person under conditions that make recognition inconvenient.
The warm colleague has done ten thousand reps you never saw. What looks like personality is usually accumulated attention.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes a moment so small it almost escapes the page. A prison guard slips him an extra piece of bread. No speech. No explanation. Just a slight deviation from protocol.
The guard’s kindness wasn’t generosity. It was refusal. A refusal to let the institution fully determine his behaviour. He noticed a human being in a system designed to make noticing impossible.
That’s what recognition looks like under pressure. Not warmth. Just: I see you. And I won’t pretend I don’t.
Here’s what I’ve started to notice in myself: The temptation to ask for a few options for a thank-you note instead of sitting with what I actually want to say. The relief when a tool drafts my reply to someone struggling, because now I don’t have to figure out what I think.
The friction is gone. I used to resent the friction.
But the friction was where the noticing happened.
When I write a message myself, slowly, badly, with half-starts and the cursor blinking on an empty screen, something shifts. I notice what I hadn’t noticed before. The specific way someone helped. The moment that mattered. The thing I’m grateful for that I couldn’t name until I tried.
A 2025 meta-analysis confirmed what I’d felt. Gratitude practices work, but only when they force real attention. The mechanism isn’t the words. It’s the noticing.
When a system generates the output, you get the words without the seeing. This is what I’ve started calling outsourced recognition. Thank-you notes, apologies, and appreciations without the moment of seeing that makes them real.
And here’s the strange thing.
Have you ever thanked an AI? Genuinely. Said “that’s really helpful, thank you” when no one was listening or watching.
Have you ever given it an update it didn’t need? Typed “hey, guess what, we won the deal” to a system that cannot care, cannot remember, cannot feel the weight of what you’re sharing?
I have. More than once.
Recognition is so deeply human that we practice it even when no one is there.
Which makes the reverse so strange. We offer recognition to machines that cannot receive it, while outsourcing recognition to machines on behalf of humans who need it.
We are polite to machines and efficient with people.
We have the instinct backwards!
And here’s the flip I hadn’t considered until recently.
Sometimes we offer gratitude not because we need to express it, but because the other person needs to receive it. We say thank you not to close our own loop, but to open theirs. To let them know they were seen.
In Atul Gawande’s Complications, a senior surgeon takes the blame for a junior doctor’s mistake. Debriefs privately instead of exposing publicly. The junior may never know. When asked why, the surgeon says: humiliation teaches fear, not competence.
Sometimes kindness is protecting someone from exposure they don’t even know they faced.
But here’s the harder truth. The one that took me longer to understand.
If you are kind, the gratitude is that you are able to be kind. Not that you will receive it back.
You might receive it. And when you do, you get your fix. But kindness at its deepest isn’t a transaction. It’s not even a gift to another person.
It’s a gift to yourself. You get to be someone who notices. That’s the reward. Everything else is extra.
This is what makes kindness impossible to optimise.
The moment you perform it for return, you’ve lost the thing that made it valuable. The moment you outsource it, you’ve skipped the part that was for you.
When people who hold power stop practicing recognition, harm doesn’t arrive as cruelty. It arrives as indifference backed by process. Decisions made about people who were never quite seen.
Last year, I spent time in hospital. And I felt it. The quiet frustration of being just another person on the ward. Processed. Categorised. Moved through a system that wasn’t unkind, only efficient.
I wanted to be addressed. I wanted someone to see that I was worried, not just that I was a case.
So I used every AI tool I could find to understand my own condition. Not to bypass the doctors, but to earn a conversation at the same level. To be met as a person who had done the work. By the end, they thought I was medically trained. I wasn’t. I was just someone who refused to be unseen.
When I was discharged, I said thank you. The doctors said thank you back.
Mutual recognition, inside a system designed for throughput. Two humans pausing to acknowledge each other.
I didn’t use tools to skip the noticing. I used them to earn the right to be noticed.
There are tasks where efficiency really is the point. Research, synthesis, first drafts. Faster is better.
But there are other tasks where the friction is the work. Where the struggle to find words is the moment you discover what you actually see.
I think there are tasks where assistance is interference.
Not because the output would be worse. Because the task isn’t about output. It’s about formation. When I let a system handle recognition on my behalf, I’m skipping the rep that would have made me capable of it.
Maybe that’s too strong. Maybe there’s a version where tools help us notice more.
But I know it exists. I lived it in that hospital bed.
Primo Levi spent his life trying to understand what happened. His answer kept returning to the same place. The moment of recognition. The moment one person sees another as fully human.
I don’t think AI is comparable to that history. The comparison would be obscene.
But I do think we’re building systems that make it easier to produce the outputs of kindness without the recognition that makes kindness human.
And I think, over time, people who outsource recognition will become people who recognise less.
The risk isn’t cruelty. It’s erosion. A drift toward a world where we express more kindness than ever and feel less seen than ever.
Because the words were never the point.
The schoolteacher who spoke to Primo Levi didn’t follow a protocol. There was no framework for that moment.
There was just a human who saw another human.
That’s the thing that proves you’re human.
It shows up in the pause where you decide whether to ask a system to speak for you.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
PS. If your organisation is grappling with how AI is reshaping work and leadership, I speak and advise on this.
Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
Building human capability for the AI era.
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