“Our ancestors survived not because they computed faster, but because they cooperated better, learning to communicate and read one another, share stories, resolve conflict and coordinate care.” — Isabel C. Hau
When I was in high school, I knew the phone numbers of all my friends and extended family households by heart. When I learned how to drive, I would sometimes get lost trying to get to a new place, and I would figure out ways to ask people for directions. Ah, the twentieth century! Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate smartphones, and thanks to map apps, I never get lost anymore, but whatever happened to those skills that I used to need? What is my brain doing with that space now? (It is probably invested in answering emails). But the way humans think and relate has changed significantly.
“Common sense is the least common of the senses,” my aunt used to say. When we struggle to solve a conflict, or to work with someone that we don’t like very much, when we interrupt or are interrupted during a conversation, or when we feel too exhausted to listen deeply to what someone has to say, we realize that especially relational skills are not as common as we need them to be and often, in a rushed world, they may not even seem to make sense.
Relational skills include the ability to be self-aware, attentive to others, and vulnerable when needed, so that our behavior invites trust, while maintaining healthy boundaries, and makes it possible to deepen closeness with the people that are most important to us. Relational skills are precious, connected actions and sensitivities that build strong relationships and healthy communities. These skills may come easily for some people and with more difficulty for others, but they can certainly be learned and improved. They take practice, intention, and a personal commitment to our most cherished values like honesty, empathy, justice, or generosity. As humans, we are happier when we get the hang of them; emotional intelligence and social support make life better and are significant in solving day-to-day matters and to recenter ourselves toward our priorities. So, the question is: on average, are we getting better or worse at these? Is this twenty-first century an era where we are unlocking new abilities or actually losing the basic tenets of the ones we take for granted?
In her thorough article Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence, Isabel C. Hau defines relational intelligence as “the ability to build trust, navigate tension, repair ruptures, and create meaning with others.” As a psychologist and university teacher, I often get asked by first-year students what I mean by “intelligence” and how I define it. Before going into nuances, my quick answer is “intelligence is the ability to solve problems.” What does relational intelligence have to do with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? AI is impacting the way that we think, just as smartphones impact the way we (don’t) memorize phone numbers or directions. It certainly presents new challenges to how we cultivate “regular” intelligence. Before, technology would pass along information to humans, and with it, humans would often generate new thoughts and ideas. Now it seems that we will be asking technology to generate new thoughts and ideas, and we only pass the information along. As concerning as this may be, what does it have to do with relationships? Besides not memorizing phone numbers, maps, and losing reading skills, we are atrophying our tolerance to frustration and the ability to navigate relational ambivalence, both indispensable to strengthening our own identity and defining how to solve problems with others. The price of losing relational skills is not only losing community, but losing ourselves.
Isabel Hau invites us to consider not only how AI is transforming education, work, and overall human connection, but how our way of being human today is defining how we design and embrace AI. We didn’t begin to lose these skills with or because of AI: this process started before that era, in a context of significantly undermined relational infrastructure. Relationships take time, endurance, and the messiness of liking and disliking; the importance of respecting boundaries while also appreciating the existence of the other person. They require balancing authenticity and kindness, the vulnerability of showing ourselves as we truly are... and being capable of allowing the other person to do the same. Relationships mean handling reconciliations and breakups, calling a friend when they need us, holding them on a bad day, or asking to be held when we find the need.
The digital world that we consume daily offers us another reality: the reality of the disposable, of the immediate, of sending reels while avoiding conversation (don’t get me wrong, I really, really enjoy a good reel!). It is the reality of the swipe left, of the yelling in the comments, of the polished appearances, and of satisfying the craving for quick dopamine hits. The virtual world doesn’t encompass all reality or human nature, but it certainly reflects its symptoms. It gives us pause when we consider that it is there where our teenagers (and children!) spend a significant amount of time learning how to relate to one another. Then AI comes into the picture, and it is so friendly, kind, and understanding. As Hau says, when they’re feeling lonely, people of all ages are turning to Large Language Models (LLMs) to offer comfort or to ask questions that they feel too embarrassed to ask another human (or forgot how to look up in books). As she notes:
“AI is stepping into the void left by fading human bonds. Machines are available, attentive, and endlessly affirming. A chatbot never interrupts. An AI girlfriend never rolls her eyes. A synthetic friend always appears to mirror our mood.”
Loneliness is a risk that Hau discusses in full: "Chronic loneliness increases the risk of early death by more than 25 percent—comparable to well-established risks like obesity and physical inactivity”. We also explored this with Julianne Holt-Lundstad, one of the researchers engaged in these studies (check out this conversation!). It may be tempting to decide that the solution is individualistic: “Practice self-care, get your act together, go, make more friends! Don’t ask AI for comfort when you are sad!” The truth is more challenging, though. We might find that we don’t know how to call anyone (everybody is busy!) or that we aren’t even sure who to reach out to... Relationships are uncomfortable and risky, and we are forgetting how to nurture them.
A relational infrastructure, defined in the article as “the intentional design of environments, schools, workplaces, health systems, communities, and digital platforms to make human connection the default, not the exception,” is a counterculture that requires intention, strategy, and collective organizing. I won’t claim to have the answer; please check out the article’s recommendations; they are great! There are multiple ways to create a relational infrastructure. Like all human things, solutions may be as infinite as human creativity (oh, and the arts may offer us beautiful and unexpected ways to explore this). But allow me to suggest that restorative practices offer specific methods and tools that, with concrete and powerful steps, bring us closer to building better relational infrastructures.
I present here some areas of our lives where restorative practices can help us to build relational infrastructure:
- Family: Once, during a circle with my children, I realized how much I wanted to interrupt them, but the circle’s “talking piece” forced me to wait and to listen. And that, in return, made their listening to me more respectful when it was my turn to share. Common sense is the least common of the senses, so tools are useful! As the nuclear family becomes smaller and people are increasingly busy and distracted, intentional daily or weekly rituals, such as family circles, affective language, and restorative questions when there’s a conflict, can bring us back to connecting and communicating. Parents (and I speak from personal experience) sometimes feel tired and confused: these practices offer a structure that supports the communication we are desperately craving.
- Education: Increasingly, schools and families with more resources are looking to make sure that the educational experience is relational and human-led. Are we creating a reality where human warmth is a commodity? We must avoid a future where human interactions become a privilege for a few. Every child should have the joy of being part of a tribe. Affective language develops emotional literacy, and relational questions encourage problem-solving skills, self-awareness, and empathy. Greetings at the door, regular circles, and celebrations improve the educational environment and enhance learning because students are more engaged and relationally connected.
- Workplace: AI presents itself as a terrorizing menace to jobs and work cultures. Still, we need to create a relational working infrastructure capable of facing changes and adversities. The workplace will remain a central part of adults’ lives and a source of influence on the larger community. In her book, Heart Strong Work, Dr. Linda Kligman presents the importance of creating an organizational culture that makes pathways for vulnerability through restorative practices, a working community that moves from blame to acknowledging and learning from mistakes with practical tools and processes to repair harm. As Angela Jackson suggested, investing time in check-ins and using restorative practices to create a healthy working environment has a significant impact on retaining talent and protecting people’s mental health.
- Community Organizing: Humans survive and thrive in community. Ellis, Dietz, and Chen explain how community resilience (the community’s ability to face adversities, survive, and thrive) is relational and place-based, and it varies depending on historical patterns of discrimination, investment priorities, and structural issues. Communities need to be strong. Parker Palmer used to say that community is that place where the person you really dislike is not going to go away. Social media offers us echo chambers, and AI offers us complacency. Community organizing requires discomfort and, in the words of Jean Paul Lederach, “improbable dialogues.” Good intentions will go a long way, but restorative practices may offer us a framework, a structure that supports our desire to walk together into uncertainty and grow from learning how to embrace different perspectives toward a shared goal.
- Healthcare: Hau also mentions healthcare, as automation becomes commonplace when we are ill or feel vulnerable. Kaethe Weingarten has explored this in full for healthcare workers: helpers need help. Since 2023, she defines compassionate witnessing as the position we take when we witness another person’s experience of violence and pain. Restorative practices offer us complementary actions that don’t substitute the healthcare practice but support it. These are actions that help us move into the witnessing position, from being aware and disempowered to becoming empowered to do intentional listening and connection. We may create space for a small circle, or maybe we can ask questions that will allow us to unpack how to support others instead of just instructing them on how to heal.
Hau speaks to us from a place of hope:
“We can start the next revolution in human intelligence. It won’t come from machines that think faster—it will come from people who relate better. From schools that teach love as literacy. From communities that measure progress not by accumulation but by connection. From public officials and foundations that invest in relational infrastructure that serves us.”
I will offer one more anecdote: since the 1980s, my dad has been a teacher for seminarians in Costa Rica who would become Catholic priests. He realized that priests were lonely, had very little support, and communities held them as powerful figures who could not find proper spaces to be vulnerable. My dad started a program called “Groups of Life.” Since then, small groups of seminarians would have an evening recreational activity once a month. This went on for years and continued after they were ordained. Groups of Life offered them a necessary relational infrastructure. There are many ways to create relational infrastructures, but this infrastructure is not the default. It needs to be made.
A final note of joy: we can create things and solutions, and action keeps us moving forward. I may feel nostalgia for the 90s, but they are gone, and that’s okay: we need to fall in love with this decade and with our common humanity, with our fellow humans of all generations navigating it. We must become passionate about being alive and marvel at what it means to be imperfect together. It will not do to limit ourselves to mechanical practices, of course, but when we authentically show up for one another, with concrete actions that connect us back to our day-to-day reality, a relational possibility emerges, a possibility toward the purpose of creating hope.
Claire de Mézerville López, Ph.D., M.Ed., M.S. is a Community Engagement Specialist and Lecturer at the IIRP Graduate School. She is a licensed psychologist from UCR (Universidad de Costa Rica) and holds a Master of Education with an emphasis on cognitive development from ITESM (Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, México). She also has a Master of Science in Restorative Practices from the IIRP Graduate School and a Doctor of Philosophy in Community Engagement from Point Park University.
