Why we must reprioritize kindness
By Abhinaya Kasagani — opinion@theaggie.org
When I first moved to college, I was uncomfortable with the urgency at which most things moved. When I got to something, everyone was already onto the next thing; friendships were fleeting, kindness was limited and, worst of all, none of this was baffling to most. Making friends in college requires you to lay your own groundwork, dig your own pit and hope the climb out isn’t too embarrassing. Sometimes, it can feel as if it is more sensible not to try. When I finally made friends, so much of the initial risk dissipated. Four walls enclosed me like a soft hug. Gratitude erupted amidst all of the smoke.
Recently, I was talking to a friend about how kindness has been scarce lately and how I was losing my inclination for it too. The consensus nowadays seems to be that compassion is fatiguing and that this dearth of kindness — caused by an increasingly polarized world — is oftentimes warranted and self-sustaining.
Altruistic instincts are frequently undermined by societal and psychological passivity, making it so that the more we’re exposed to suffering, the less inclined we are to be kind. As counterproductive as that is, tendencies like diffusion of responsibility and compassion fatigue fuel a cycle of further disconnection, tricking us into viewing kindness as secondary rather than essential. What we fail to remember is that the act of kindness is inherently reciprocal.
When I chose to title this piece “Space for sweetness in a dog-eat-dog world,” I had to remind myself of the goodness that sustained me throughout my time here. I am a product of such kindness — of my best friend coming over to help me with laundry when I was sick, of a friend showing up at my door with tomatoes and burrata that we happily devoured in silence, of my old roommate brushing the knots out of my hair simply because it occurred to her, to them, in that moment to ask and to concern themselves with someone other than themselves.
Kindness is so easy to muster, yet we still shy away from it because it is easier not to care. This rhetoric of dog-eat-dog has permeated the social sphere and led to a gradual erosion of our altruistic instincts. We are now more inclined than ever to internalize the notion that personal achievements precede all, and so we deprioritize kindness. This sets off a chain reaction: with deprioritized kindness, people are worse off and the consumption of negative media exhausts us and worsens our anxiety, leading us to continue disregarding kindness. The cyclicality of our passivity is inescapable.
There is such loss amidst all the traffic and ambition — a desire to compete against rather than alongside — and so we grab onto multiple threads and lose track of them all. I would implore one to ask themselves if, and why, kindness to them is superfluous and no longer a priority.
The environments we inhabit are only becoming further divided, making it necessary for us to consciously embrace it. It has been observed that people in large groups, those accustomed to kindness within their circles, feel less inclined to take individual responsibility (a phenomenon known as diffusion of responsibility) and often ignore opportunities to offer support. Challenging this dog-eat-dog mindset that we have acclimated ourselves to scrutinizes how one’s passivity only further feeds into this unkindness.
More often than not, this desire for goodness is fueled by the expectation of a reward. The lack of reward has made it so that one is less willing to embrace it naturally. People often assume that the smallness of their kindness won’t truly contribute or that someone else will do it instead (someone might, but you always could!).
What I’ve found to be true during my time here is that you make a series of patient, conscious acts of kindness, and whether or not they amount to anything, only time will tell. What matters more is that you pay attention to the defiant, celebratory quality of the act itself. Again, altruism is not the goal — it has never been. There is no need to be grandiose or self-sacrificial; small is big.
Kindness is easy to forget but just as easy to remember. If you call to mind this doggedness, of once breaking off a piece of your lunch, of once sharing plastic tools in a sandbox, you urge the dog-eat-dog of it all to become undesirable. Tenderness is in the air. Hold each other’s hands. There is space for everyone and for sweetness.
Written by: Abhinaya Kasagani— akasagani@ucdavis.edu
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