most people are kind in public, especially in places where they need to perform for someone who is watching, and i am wondering:
why did something so simple become something so calculated?
for obvious reasons, i assume, i believe it’s because of the internet. not the internet as a true network, but the internet that social media has created in the past decade. an internet that is no longer defined by us, but one that defines who we are. it has made us start measuring ourselves against people we have never met, wanting things we had never wanted before, becoming driven by an interest that exists only in ourselves. and once this self-interest becomes the engine, everything around us turns into a resource.
kindness was always one of the things people loved the most and responded to. and what is the easiest thing to leverage when you want something from people? what they love. so kindness was absorbed too, and became another thing to extract from.
the act of competing is one of the clearest places to see the impact of self-interest. competition can be healthy if it comes from a desire to grow or simply to be entertained. that competition is when you want to win without needing another person to be destroyed by your victory. but now, so much of what makes us compete is the desire to see someone else lose. the reason we want to win is not always the joy of becoming better or the fun of it, but the pleasure of staying above someone else.
kindness to me is something really simple. it is helping someone without expecting anything back, or speaking gently because you want to. it is doing things because they are what you genuinely want to do, not because they will be seen and validated by someone on the internet who doesn’t know you and doesn’t care about you in the first place.
and more than this, being kind is free, because you can be kind without spending a thing. but in the world we live in, it is also one of the most expensive things a person can do because to actually be kind you have to give up so much of what this world rewards. you have to give up the need to be seen, and the small wins of always being right, and more than anything, you have to give up your pride.
pride is what makes it hard to say thank you. pride is what makes it hard to offer empathy to the one who has hurt you. pride is what makes it hard to help someone who cannot pay you back, simply because you want to. pride is the thing that does not allow us to lower ourselves, even when lowering ourselves would set someone else free.
looking back at my journey, i am able to recognize when i am kind because i am supposed to be, and when i am kind because i want to be. i recognize it through what i feel within myself. when you do something because you genuinely want to, it gives you a feeling of peace, a feeling that can only be understood when you actually do it. but when you are kind to obtain something, and not because you genuinely want to be, you feel a kind of guilt inside your heart.
but real kindness cannot be sustained on its own. actually, i don’t think you can be kind on your own. a lot of people called me kind in the past, and i thought i was kind as well, but when i started getting closer to God i realized that only now am i starting to taste what real kindness actually is. i have done acts of kindness in the past as well, but they were never like the ones i’ve done since following a new path. it truly feels like i am doing them because i want to do them with all my heart, and i don’t care about anything else but the act itself. it’s absolutely transforming.
the closer i come to Him, the easier it is to be kind, because i am able to see something i was so blind to before. everything we are chasing here, even with our acts of kindness, is fleeting. everything. people i loved are no longer in my life. many things i valued are gone. things i built disappeared because their time was over. i have lived all of these things, and i am sure you have as well. many of the people, certainties, and futures you were so sure of are not there anymore.
and once you really see that, self-interest starts to lose its meaning. the chase becomes weightless, and what is left underneath is one of the only things that was ever real: each other.
the world is being replaced. almost everything we look at now is being turned into weightless, fleeting content. but there are still things that matter, even if they are few. the kindness that comes from the deepest parts of our hearts is among these things.
to me, there has never been a better moment to wake the kindness that lies dormant within us. i am chasing it every single day. the world is being replaced, and i am trying to bring it back more and more, while there is still something human left to protect.
one way i believe we can do this is by first realizing the impact kindness has had on us. i am sure that every single one of you reading this essay has been, at least once, the “victim” of a kind thing someone did to you.
so i’ve brought to life kind’d. here, i invite you to write down a kind thing someone did to you, and to share it anonymously. each note joins the others. you, or anyone else who wants to explore the experience, will go through the notes one by one, spending some time with the kind things someone did for someone else.
through this, i hope we can realize that kindness, just like us, does not belong to an algorithm. it is still ours to choose, and it is free.
kind’d will run for as long as i am alive, because i believe the acts of kindness done to us can always serve as an inspiration, not just to us, but also to everyone else, to start being kind as well.
with all this said, how did you get kind’d?
if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me here on substack, or on any other social platform (@eduardmsmr on all platforms)🌹
big part of this essay was first written in, “a protest against not feeling anything”, which i released a while ago. i chose to use it as inspiration for this one, and to make it central to kind’d, because it fits what this experience is about.
a long time ago i said that i would ask each person who joined the protest whether they were okay with me sharing those essays publicly, but for this one i decided not to, simply because i truly believe that some of these words about kindness shouldn’t be confined to a physical product.