Selecting for Kindness
By: Mk Lords
Tags: Values, Kindness, Personal Development, Social Change, Depression

I’m too dumb to be a Real Scientist, but have always challenged myself with personal social experiments. It’s how I test my values or study other people & I’ve done it all my life, from the time I chose to stop shaving at 15, to embracing the uncertainty of the road as a “digital nomad” three years ago. I’ve gone through massive shifts in perspective & lifestyles over the last 16 years, but my most meaningful choice was a small, simple one: selecting my company based on Kindness.

I used to value honesty above everything else, having been raised by brutally honest working class parents & eventually working in industries where feelings were seen as a weakness. But “logic vs feelings” has always been an irrational dichotomy because everyone contains both & feels their feelings are logical & their logic is devoid of emotion. Humans are silly creatures.

I also used to pride myself in finding smarter & stranger rooms. Cue the eye rolling, I know. But smart people can be cruel. Cruelty & arrogance have got to be the worst personality traits no matter how intelligent someone is — don’t get me started on “geniuses” either. The more geniuses I met, the less impressed I was, unless they were also Kind.

My obsession with Total Honesty honestly made me miserable. I sat with those Harsh Truths & internalized a lot of things that seemed true but weren’t. Or were true & weren’t useful. Oftentimes my most cynical predictions were correct, but there’s no joy in being correct about shitty things. Being Technically Correct yet alone is no victory.

Depressive Realism

I also struggle with clinical depression, which paints a more realistic view of reality that isn’t super helpful when one needs the motivation you get from higher self esteem. Depressive realism might make you right, but it won’t make you happy.

By 2016, I was more depressed than I’d ever been. So many things in my life had fallen apart & I couldn’t see a way forward. Each day felt like something to merely survive. I lost the ability to imagine a long term future as I had during other low points. Everything I used to care about didn’t matter, even politics, which I had been (unhealthily) obsessed with my whole life.

I was a ghost in my own life & the tough love approach I always had towards my stumbles no longer worked. There were no bootstraps left to pull up.

My fixation with ethics & politics had made me more ideologically rigid than expected. I had to disentangle myself from the toxic political worlds I was in. So, I hit the reset button, or rather, my brain did it for me during a painful dissociative episode that erased a lot of data. This extremely frustrating, stress-induced experience forced me to re-evaluate everything I believed. With the help of some friends & family, I was able to get back on my feet, but I had to find healthier social outlets.

Midway through 2016, I made the conscious decision to connect with others based on Kindness instead of how funny, honest, or smart they were. My core relationships didn’t change much, but I deprioritized labels entirely in favor of…well, Vibes. Vibes are counter to a lot of belief systems I’d held, not at all scientific, but very useful in sorting out who is truly Kind over who is Nice.

Kindness vs Niceness

Kindness is not the same as niceness — being nice is a performative gesture for others. Niceness resembles Kindness. Anyone can be nice: appearing to do & say the right things at the right time, but a lot of otherwise nice people won’t really be there for you when shit really hits the fan. There are traumas one can go through that alienate the nice people in their lives because the nice people don’t want to look at another person falling apart. Or get covered in shit.

Kindness is a deeper gentleness that yields when necessary, but sometimes counters social niceties. Not-so-nice appearing people can be quite kind. Kindness is the ability to sit with those who are suffering instead of running away — it’s rooted in empathy not sympathy. Kindness means putting aside ego to directly help someone because it’s the right thing to do, not because someone has the right views on [insert opinion/belief here].

Kindness sometimes means getting burned by others, but getting right back up & doing it again because Fuck ’Em, you’re not defined by what they do. Sometimes you are defined by what you won’t or don’t do.

A statue isn’t built from the ground up — it’s chiseled out of a block of marble — and I often wonder if we aren’t likewise shaped by the qualities we lack, outlined by the empty space where the marble used to be. I’ll be sitting on a train. I’ll be lying awake in bed. I’ll be watching a movie; I’ll be laughing. And then, all of a sudden, I’ll be struck by the paralyzing truth: It’s not what we do that makes us who we are. It’s what we don’t do that defines us. Bob-Waksberg, Raphael. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory (p. 60).

We all look away to a degree because we have to to survive, but whatever people believe are political solutions to social problems will be useless if they ignore that most people don’t want to look at suffering & are okay with whatever measures need to be taken to remove it from their view. This results in cold social services & the deeper problems we’re seeing under the pandemic, but the problems have been there all along due to a historically anti-human, cruel hierarchy of priorities. Comparisons to other countries will rob you of any joy one could have under this distinctly ‘Merican capitalist system. It’s becoming harder for people to look away.

The broader lack of both empathy & sympathy often comes from reactions to trauma — some people get kinder under hardship, but many people don’t. We’re seeing reactionary terror management on a massive scale this year as it’s been shocking who has chosen to fight back against cruelty, who has viciously attacked the suffering, or who simply tries to keep looking away.

No one tells you that you’re too difficult to talk to or look at when things are severe. Mostly, you start to hear nothing. Silence settles in around you & can abandon you with your own thoughts. Or, people talk to you in very delicate tones. The gradients of concern in the way someone asks, “Are you okay?” can be disturbing.

People worrying about you is embarrassing if you’re a type that has prided yourself on being so tough for so long. Asking for help is even harder — it’s been more humiliating to me to ask for assistance when I’ve needed it than all the embarrassing things I’ve done as a result of flailing while trying to do things completely on my own.

Being kind to yourself is one of the hardest skills to learn & also means setting aside ego. I still struggle with self love & it’s nigh impossible to not crack a joke as I write this, but practicing Kindness for others has helped. Kindness is an action not only a value & actions reveal character better than all the proper rhetoric.

The Kind people were the ones who stuck around & kept reaching out even when things got quiet on my end. They didn’t say, “Let me know if you need help,” they said, “Here’s how I can help, take it or leave it, no judgment.” These were folks who had been there & knew what it felt like to be in a hole with seemingly no way out.

Kind people don’t fall along expected metrics. My Trump voting landlord allowed me to go off lease without fear of eviction after a family tragedy uprooted everything in 2017. People who claimed to have the same values as me disappeared or even became hostile when I refused certain labels that no longer fit or boxed me in.

Who helps you when you’re at your lowest is surprising & the correct labels mean very little when it comes down to who you can count on. You don’t have to sacrifice honesty for Kindness either — those who care can find a way to be real with you without being an asshole.

By allowing myself to be surprised & receptive to Kindness rather than Brutal Total Honesty, I was able to heal from a lot of trauma. In every crisis, the only thing that matters is who shows up.

The Broader Implications

We’re seeing this deeply powerful showing up on a global scale right now. People have had to find out the hard way who matters in their lives — who has their back when things get quiet regardless of political beliefs or all of the ways disinformation warps minds. Political beliefs have affected what people prioritize in this specific crisis & it’s been shocking how low some have stooped, but equally revealing who has not allowed themselves to fall into a selfish, cruel, petty nihilism.

“Fuck You I’ve Got Mine” is a 14 year old boy’s desperate, sad attempt to organize the chaos in his life, not something to base an economic system on.

Selecting for Kindness has enriched every part of my life. It’s helped me clarify my goals & manage my time based on which people choose me.

I know the “truth” of how meaningless everything is & I’m bored by it.

It’s easy to become hardened by hardship. I’ve let it happen before & it’s the default state of many people when faced with certain circumstances. I don’t even blame people for taking the default route — we’re all struggling with outdated programming that kicks in unexpectedly.

But what separates the resilient long term is choosing empathy when the worst parts of you are telling you to choose cruelty. You have to fight for Kindness.

As the year has progressed down an increasingly catastrophic, dystopian path I feel strangely prepared (despite in no way being materially prepared HAHA). It’s not that I don’t have my bad days where I rage about how selfish & petty people are acting, but because I made the choice to seek out allies who prioritize & practice Kindness, I am faring relatively well. I’ve also let go of those who would rather engage in human sacrifice than be slightly inconvenienced. Who & what matters have become even clearer as this virus takes so much away.

And I can remind myself that even those who chose cruelty can become better if they decide to one day make the harder choice for Kindness. My Trump supporting landlord withdrew her support for the aspiring dictator shortly after he took office because she was horrified by the cruelty exhibited by his administration & followers. She chose Kindness over cruelty because she correctly foresaw it as the true divide years before it became painfully clear how far some are willing to go to signal disvirtue.

It sounds too simple to be true & maybe it is, but I don’t care. I was wrong about Honesty being more important than Kindness & I’m glad I was wrong. If my own life has been made so significantly better by applying this experiment, I imagine how much better the world would be if more people elevated Kindness above other priorities, or at least chose their company with the virtue in mind.

The Kind people I’ve found have inspired enough faith to be able to imagine the future again & I wish that for everyone who grapples with the mindkiller of depression. I don’t know how to make people care about those other than themselves & part of me thinks it isn’t possible. So instead of banging my head against the wall trying to get people to Give A Damn, I intentionally sought out people who already do, Bigly. It made this Hell Year a hell of a lot easier.

My deepest appreciation in 2020 is for the Kind Folks who retained their Kindness during one of the largest, longest, demoralizing tests of empathy-driven values in recent history. It’s not over by a long shot.

As we head to another year of extreme suffering caused by callousness & cruelty, I hope to retain some softness by the end of it. I can’t say I’m as Kind as I wish I was, but have found peace in the chaos of this year through my Kind friends who didn’t let tragedy turn them into tyrants.