We are told—constantly—that the world is cruel, people are selfish, and civility is a relic of a bygone era. Maybe I’m old school, but I think the world is still full of good and decent people. Especially in the south.
A recent Gallup survey of more than 2,000 American adults found that 60 percent regularly see people treating others with kindness and respect. Sixty-five percent said someone in their community had done something kind for them multiple times in the previous week. And nearly three-quarters described Americans generally as kind. That seems worth noticing, especially because our national conversation often suggests precisely the opposite.
Last week I stopped to help a woman change a flat tire in Sandy Springs, Georgia. As I was loading everything into her trunk, she asked twice how much a new tire cost. Before I left, I quietly dropped $150 on her passenger seat for the tire. I quickly said goodbye and drove away.
That got me thinking. Perhaps ordinary interactions between ordinary people remain remarkably…ordinary and decent. Like when someone lets you merge into traffic on I-85 when they don’t have to. Or when a total stranger holds the door open for you at Chick-fil-A when your hands are full. Or when someone returns their grocery cart to where it belongs. Or says “excuse me” instead of just forcing their way to the front of the line.
Among Americans 65 and older, 64 percent say they are very comfortable initiating an act of kindness toward someone they don’t know. Among people ages 18 to 29, only 35 percent agree. Imagine that. The generation most fluent in communicating with people around the world may be the generation least comfortable speaking to someone three feet away. Odd that with all this technology, speaking to a stranger three feet away seems daunting.
Perhaps we’ve become unusually good at avoiding people. Technology has helped us remove countless little interactions from everyday life. We order food without speaking to anyone. We check ourselves out at Publix. We deposit checks from our phones. We buy almost anything on Amazon. We can walk through Walgreens wearing headphones, staring at a screen, communicating with people hundreds of miles away while barely acknowledging the other humans at the pharmacy counter. Most of this is wonderfully convenient, but convenience has consequences. What happens when we systematically eliminate all those insignificant encounters with strangers? But wait, maybe they weren’t insignificant after all. Maybe those tiny exchanges were practice: practice making eye contact, practice reading another person’s expression, practice starting conversations, practice offering help, practice being briefly uncomfortable. And perhaps even practice recognizing that the stranger standing next to us isn’t really that strange.
The Gallup findings contain another clue. People who experience kindness more frequently are themselves more comfortable initiating it. Of course, correlation isn’t causation. Kind people may simply find one another. Still, it’s hard not to wonder whether kindness has a kind of compounding effect. And, whether the tire lady will pass-on the kindness to another. I sure hope so.
The reverse might also be true. If we rarely experience kindness, perhaps we gradually stop expecting it. And once we stop expecting kindness from strangers, approaching strangers begins to feel less natural. But societies are made of people, and people encounter one another in parking lots, grocery stores, sidewalks, restaurants, airplanes and on the side of the road.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying about what “America” has become, as though America was something happening somewhere else. But America is right in front of you. It’s the woman who notices you’ve left your phone on the Waffle House counter. It’s the person who sees someone struggling and decides to offer help. Much of what holds a society together is the almost invisible hand of kindness.
Gallup’s survey suggests Americans are seeing considerably more of it than our public conversation might lead us to believe. That’s encouraging, but the age gap should make us curious. If younger people really are becoming less comfortable initiating kindness toward strangers, we should ask why. Maybe people naturally become more comfortable with these interactions as they get older. Gallup can’t answer that yet. But we don’t have to wait twenty years to conduct our own experiment. Put the phone away. Make eye contact with a stranger. Offer the seat. Hold the door. Ask the question. Risk the awkwardness. Because maybe kindness doesn’t disappear because people stop caring. Maybe it disappears because everyone is waiting for somebody else to go first.
