Seeing how the world had been going; with history keep repeating - whether with human intervention or not made us wonder, are we lacking kindness?
Honestly, I don't think so.
My friend and I had long discussed this issue, the question of are we lacking kindness? Is greed now above everything? Perhaps. But maybe we had been looking at it from the wrong angle.
The main and foremost question is, what is kindness? According to Wikipedia, Kindness is a type of behavior marked by acts of generosity, consideration, or concern for others, without expecting praise or reward.
To be honest I believe the majority of people are kind or at least have good intentions in their beliefs and actions. However the problem lies on how they acted based on their misguided belief on acts of kindness.
History shows that almost everything started with good intentions; leaders build kingdoms or establish states to unite people, leaders ignite revolutions for a better living, leaders launch campaigns and establish organisations to battle injustice. All of them have one thing in common - they have the best interest for everyone.
However over time these values slowly go away as they become corrupted by greed, power and paranoia, which unfortunately often leads to conflicts.
I used to think one of the factors why we may think people are lacking kindness nowadays is attributed to social media. Social media is a very vicious place to be; with anonymity behind screens, they’re able to say the cruelest things to you, knowing they won't receive any real-life repercussions. Propagandas are also easily spread around thanks to social media. I used to think the majority of social media contents tends to focus on negativity and these materials are the loudest, thus overpowering the positive contents.
However over time I began to realise social media contents that actually highlight the best in humanity and display kindness are as equal as the negative ones. So why are we still thinking that humanity is lost? Why are we thinking the current world is lacking kindness?
I believe the answer lies to human nature to tend to remember negative things more. You may have nine good moments and one bad moment that happened in a day and yet the thing you will remember the most and lament is that one bad moment.
Gary Vaynerchuk once said in one of his videos; “I think humans find what they are looking for. If you’rre signing to Twitter to find a fight, or to see some negativity, you're gonna find it. I think if you go to Twitter or Instagram to find happiness and positivity, it’s there at scale. I’m fascinated by communication and I’m fascinated that we now have a collective ability to communicate at a scale that we've never seen before. Right now people are focusing on the downside of that and I think we’re forgetting the upside of it”.
If you look and follow the right contents, you will realise kindness hasn't and will never die. Often people we viewed as unremarkable are the one displaying the biggest acts of kindness. The everyday people. Why? Because all the things they did were out of sincerity which didn’t need to be shown to the world. They may do them as a daily routine because kindness is what is installed in them. Oftentimes you learn these people did many acts of kindness that the world didn’t know.
Oftentimes you may not realise your act of kindness, which may seem little or simple to you may mean big to others. A simple thank you, random praise may not only brighten someone's day, it may even save a life. You’ll never know what a person went through and what they were having in their minds; they may be at the brink of wanting to end their life, feeling hopeless, feeling humanity and kindness had gone - and that’s when another person's act of kindness may repel these kinds of thoughts and save a life.
Throughout my life I had seen many random acts of kindness. I have my own personal experiences receiving multitudes of kindness from the people I know and strangers alike. Wherever people wanted to start conflicts that focused on genders, races, religions and nationalities, I’ll be reminded that I had been receiving kindness from all kinds of genders, races, religions and nationalities alike. I’ll be reminded not to take whatever negative news or social media contents too deep because I know they’re just sensationalizing in highlighting the negative aspects of the world when the truth is we are still surrounded by positivity and kindness.
In short, we are not lacking kindness.
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