Thursday, Oct 30

Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better.

Dear Reader,

It can feel as though kindness is as endangered as black rhinos and Bornean orangutans. It’s threatened enough that world leaders have been calling for more of it, including Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand, who calls it a “different kind of leadership.” 

Author George Saunders went viral with his commencement speech at Syracuse University, in which he told graduates that what he regretted most in life were his “failures of kindness.” After asking them to think of those in their lives they remembered most fondly (“those who were kindest to you, I bet”), he offered this: “It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.”

Paul Myers recently wrote a book about the beloved actor John Candy, someone who was described repeatedly as “being kind even when nobody was looking.” The reason we continue to love John Candy, he told a CBC reporter, was that kindness. “Kindness and empathy,” Myers concluded, acknowledging that he might sound like a “hippie,” “I honestly believe that is the way out of everything in our contemporary society.” 

Jacinda Ardern agrees, noting that “I’d seen it give people hope; I’d seen it change minds and transform lives,” which is why she made it a pillar of her leadership.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if, say, a fossil-fuel company decided to put people over profits? (We’re not seeing it yet, but fortunately plenty of people are fighting to make them, such as some folks in Santa Barbara.) Or if we acted as though we truly believed everyone should have the same human rights, regardless of race, religion, socio-economic status, gender, age? 

Everyone from Aldous Huxley to Myers acknowledges that preaching kindness feels a little embarrassing, like some quaint convention from a bygone era. And yet, kindness can — it already has — changed the world.  

Kindly,

Dot

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