How do I stay connected to the people my decisions affect?

You feel the burden of what your decisions do, but the distance between a policy on a page and the person it lands on can quietly numb you. Noticing that numbness, instead of letting it take over, is what keeps you honest. The dangerous place is not feeling the distance. It is forgetting there was ever a person at the end of it. Rules have to be written at a distance; that is how they stay fair and consistent. But a rule that forgets it touches real lives becomes something cold and sometimes cruel. Your job is to hold both: the clean logic of the policy and the warm fact that it hits actual people with actual lives. Losing either one makes worse policy. You are trying to hold both, which is exactly right. Build one habit to keep the people in view: before you finalize something, picture one specific person it will affect, not a category, a person, and ask how it lands for them. That single image pulls the work back from the abstract. You cannot know every consequence. But you can refuse to let the distance make you forget who is really there.