When did being kind become less impressive than being busy?
There was a time when kindness occupied a curious place in the social imagination. It wasn't naïve. It wasn't performative. It wasn't the subject of LinkedIn posts accompanied by photos of mountain sunrises.
It was simply considered a virtue.
Somewhere along the way, however, kindness acquired a branding problem.
Today, we'd rather be described as smart. Or ambitious. Or exceptionally busy. Busy, after all, has become a status symbol. It quietly suggests demand. Importance. Scarcity.
Kindness, meanwhile, has been quietly reassigned to a different department—somewhere between pleasant and slightly easy to manipulate.
An unfortunate demotion.
The Sophistication of Cynicism
There is a peculiar cultural phenomenon in which cynicism often masquerades as intelligence. To believe in people is simplistic. To distrust everyone? Now that feels sophisticated.
Perhaps that's why irony has become our native language. It allows us to remain emotionally uninsured. If we never fully commit—to an opinion, to another person, to hope itself—we never have to risk looking foolish.
The American writer David Foster Wallace observed that irony is remarkably effective at exposing hypocrisy, but hopeless at constructing anything in its place.
Irony dismantles. It rarely builds. Kindness, on the other hand, builds almost exclusively.
Perhaps this explains why it rarely goes viral. Suspicion spreads faster than trust. Outrage attracts more attention than quiet decency. Algorithms optimize for reaction, not restoration.
Yet most of our lives are not transformed by spectacular events. They are transformed by ordinary people behaving just a little better than necessary.
When Warmth Became Aspirational
For decades, luxury sold distance.
Look back at fashion campaigns from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The models rarely smiled. The rooms were immaculate. Everyone appeared emotionally unavailable. Desire was built through scarcity—not only of products, but of warmth.
The message was subtle but unmistakable:
"If you own this object, perhaps one day you too will become impossible to reach."
Something has changed. Across fashion, photography and design, we have quietly begun to rediscover play. Fruit appears on runways. Sunlight replaces marble. Picnic blankets replace penthouses. Colour returns. Intimacy returns. Leisure becomes aesthetic again.
Jacquemus is perhaps the clearest expression of this shift, but certainly not its only author.
Softness has become desirable again. The world did not become gentler. It became exhausting.
Perhaps luxury no longer means distance. Perhaps luxury is emotional temperature.
Cinema—and Literature—Have Always Known This
Think of the characters who stay with us. Not necessarily the loudest. Often, the kindest.
Amélie quietly rearranges the lives of strangers without asking for recognition.
In Perfect Days, Hirayama cleans public toilets with extraordinary attention—not because anyone is watching, but because care itself becomes a philosophy.
George Eliot understood this long before cinema existed.
Near the end of Middlemarch, she writes that
"the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts."
Small gestures. Invisible decisions. Lives improved without applause. It is one of literature's quietest—and most radical—ideas.
History remembers revolutions. Civilization survives because someone still chooses kindness on an ordinary Tuesday morning.
The Economics of Kindness
For a long time, Western culture has been fascinated by competition. We celebrate the disruptor, the lone genius, the self-made individual who triumphs against the odds. It makes for excellent cinema.
Less so for evolutionary biology.
In The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin wrote something that is curiously absent from most motivational speeches:
"Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best."
Contrary to the popular caricature of "survival of the fittest," Darwin devoted considerable attention to sympathy, cooperation and what he called the social instincts. Survival, he argued, was never simply an individual achievement.
It was relational.
More than a century later, evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak reached a similar conclusion. After decades of mathematical modelling, he proposed cooperation — not competition — as one of the fundamental forces shaping evolution. In SuperCooperators, he argues that life repeatedly became more complex because organisms learned to collaborate rather than merely outcompete one another.
Economics eventually arrived at a surprisingly similar place.
Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, spent her career studying communities that successfully managed shared resources without relying on either ruthless competition or heavy regulation. Again and again, she found that trust, reciprocity and reputation produced remarkably stable systems.
Cooperation wasn't naïve. It was efficient.
Even game theory—hardly famous for sentimentality—reluctantly agrees.
In repeated versions of the Prisoner's Dilemma, strategies based on reciprocal cooperation consistently outperform perpetual aggression over time. The most successful players are rarely those who betray first. More often, they begin with trust, respond proportionally, and remain willing to cooperate again.
Hollywood simply gave better publicity to lone wolves. Evolution has been quietly rewarding good neighbours.
Why Kindness Lost Status
If cooperation is so effective, why does kindness often feel socially undervalued?
Sociologist Richard Sennett offers an intriguing clue.
In Respect (2003), he argues that modern societies increasingly reward competence over character. We admire independence, productivity and expertise. Needing other people has become something to overcome rather than something to acknowledge.
Dependence, once understood as an ordinary part of being human, begins to resemble weakness. Kindness suffers in this environment. It hasn't become less useful. It reminds us that we are connected.
That our lives are built not only through achievement, but through countless exchanges of trust, patience and care.
Perhaps we stopped celebrating kindness because we started celebrating self-sufficiency. The irony, of course, is that no one becomes self-sufficient alone.
The Kindness Paradox
Kindness suffers from another unfortunate public relations problem. It is often mistaken for compliance.
Psychology draws a much sharper distinction. People-pleasing is not an excess of kindness. It is usually an adaptation.
Developmental psychologist Alice Miller observed that emotionally perceptive children often learn to anticipate the needs of others in order to preserve attachment. Their sensitivity becomes less a free choice than a survival strategy. Approval gradually begins to feel safer than authenticity.
What appears generous from the outside may actually be organised around fear. Fear of disappointing. Fear of conflict. Fear of becoming less lovable.
Clinical psychologist Harriet Braiker later described this pattern in The Disease to Please: a compulsive orientation toward external validation that frequently leads to anxiety, resentment and emotional exhaustion.
Kindness operates from an entirely different psychological architecture.
People-pleasing asks:
"How can I avoid losing your approval?"
Kindness asks:
"What response best honours both of us?"
Sometimes those answers are identical. Sometimes they could not be more different. A boundary can be profoundly kind. So can a difficult conversation. So can disappointing someone today instead of abandoning yourself for years.
Psychologist Carl Rogers believed that healthy relationships require congruence—the alignment between one's inner experience and outward behaviour. Without that alignment, warmth slowly becomes performance.
The paradox is simple. People-pleasers often appear kinder than they feel. Truly kind people are sometimes mistaken for difficult. They understand that integrity occasionally sounds like no.
Perhaps kindness is not the absence of friction. Perhaps it is the refusal to create unnecessary suffering—for others or for yourself.
The Kindness Compass
Remaining kind is surprisingly simple. Remaining kind without disappearing is more difficult.
The next time you are about to say yes, pause for a moment.
Ask yourself three quiet questions.
- Am I acting from fear—or from generosity?
- Does this respect the other person?
- Does it also respect me?
If one of those answers disappears, kindness usually has too. Sometimes what looks like kindness is only the fear of disappointing someone.
A Brief Field Guide to Modern Prestige
The internet suggests prestige looks something like this.
Inbox Zero.
Six morning habits.
Twelve income streams.
Cold plunges.
Business class.
Saying "circle back."
Reality suggests otherwise.
The people who permanently alter our lives usually do something much less cinematic.
They listen.
They remember our name six months later.
They send the message they didn't have to send.
They stay a little longer.
They make us feel less alone.
Curiously, none of these behaviours come with a verified badge.
Perhaps We've Been Measuring the Wrong Things
There is no global ranking for tenderness.
No Forbes list of people who made strangers feel safe.
No annual award for Most Emotionally Restorative Presence. Which is unfortunate. Some of history's greatest achievements cannot be graphed.
The parent who interrupted a cycle of cruelty.
The teacher who believed a child before anyone else did.
The stranger who chose not to humiliate someone when they easily could have.
These rarely become headlines.
Yet they quietly change the emotional architecture of the world.
History celebrates revolutions.
Daily life is held together by something quieter.
Someone who answers gently. Someone who keeps their word. Someone who chooses not to pass suffering forward.
Perhaps civilization has always depended less on extraordinary people than on ordinary acts of kindness repeated often enough to become culture.
With care,
La Séance