To be fair, this is also incredibly exhausting. Most peoples' reactions to things are arbitrary at best and constant worrying about how they will take something is just way too much BS to put into my day. I bought pretty deeply into this philosophy once and it just made me neurotic and quiet at a time of my life where those things very much hurt me.

I think being selectively kind makes a lot more sense. I'm kind to children and animals and my loved ones. People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant.

I'm not one of those "grow a thick skin, jerk" types, but there's this cheap sentiment I see about how everyone needs to be more kind and compassionate, and when its not phoned in, it usually ends up as a way to take advantage of others. Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas and its totally another thing for some kid no one gives a shit about trying to make his way in the world try to live it.

I find high-concept philosophies are often the playthings of the well-off and comfortable. If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me. Like a soccer mom telling me how wonderful the Maharishi is or how relaxing doing 4 hours of Yoga is (no, she doesnt work, her husband does) and after I got off a long shift and dealt with a lot of shit and a crappy commute.

Cheap sentiment just doesn't resolve the fundamental issue facing humanity today and probably until our final extinction event: we are all competing for the very same resources and competition can sometimes be ugly. It doesn't need to be truly awful and we shouldn't be encouraged to be overly negative and vindictive, but conflict and disagreement happens on a certain level and pretending we can kindly make it go away is just being unrealistic about our fundamental economic beings. Kindness is often taken advantage of as one party feels obligated to engage in it moreso than the other. This is a fairly large problem in gender politics where we raise women to be kind and then they find themselves at a disadvantage to men in the workplace who don't have these values.

Considering everyone here is visiting a hard-nosed libertarian-leaning entrepreneur forum about becoming wealthy quickly, but the second something pseudo-spiritual gets posted suddenly we're all Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. We're not. If anything, the personality types here are very, very far from any sort of selfless ideal. Patting ourselves on the back because our six-figure salaries let us rise above the struggle doesn't mean the struggle doesn't exist and that struggle means acting in a rational, usually unkind way. High class pseudo-spirituality is such a hilariously hypocritical thing its a running gag on HBO's Silicon Valley, yet here we are Gavin Belson'ing it up. At least I'm honest with myself to say that, no, I'm not "kind" by these standards and that I will argue and fight with you when I feel its appropriate and more importantly -- I will not feel bad about it afterwards.

Sadly, most of the replies to my comment are fairly unkind responses telling me how much of a horrible person I am, especially to retail staff even though I gave no concrete examples of how I act. How ironic. If anyone is truly interested, I meditate daily and follow Buddhist ideals. I just refuse to go to the yogi-like extremes of insincere self-love in an attempt to con my way out of the struggle of Samsara. Accepting the reality of who I am is real mindfulness and liberating, and that person is not this uber-kind enlightened being who is 'above it all' and I doubt anyone here reading this is either. If anything, if we're buying into cheap manufactured sentiment that just happens to be self-complimentary, I'd say we're fairly far from that ideal. The same way we point at the nasty evangelicals will hearts full of hate who pat each other on the back for being so pious. Lets not go that route, as tempting as it is. All the technology is showing you this message was made by sweatshop-style labor. We're just not kind.