“man hands on misery to man”
—Philip Larkin
I had a book come out last July. It was about a dead poet and it led to many speaking engagements (be careful what you wish for). Nearly every weekend during the fall semester of 2025, I was on the road or in the air. Once, on the water.
Typically, I spend my days monastically alone at my desk. But these trips took me to universities, book festivals, bookstores, public libraries, record shops, and music venues. Just as significantly: interstates, airports, hotels, motels, Ubers, taxis, restaurants, food trucks, gas stations, drug stores, grocery stores, bars, and diners. In other words, democratic spaces where American strangers encounter American strangers.
What I witnessed in these spaces alarmed me. Basic human interactions seemed poisoned. Instances of rudeness and aggression that I once thought rare were routine. People were noticeably hostile, inconsiderate, paranoid, jumpy, rushed, pissed, straight up mean. Most of the conflicts I witnessed were small, but they led to a big hypothesis: kindness is dying. Maybe it’s already dead.
Surveys suggest as much. Half of Americans think we’ve all become ruder since the pandemic. Twenty percent think we’re a lot ruder. While I was considering this uptick in rudeness, my news feed reported yet another rude remark from the president.
Leaving it at that, however, neglects the structural conditions informing our increasing misanthropy. Shouting presidential invective into the Thunderdome only works to polarize us because empathy in America has already been eroded by more infectious forces. These include, but are not limited to, changes in digital technology, an unprecedented consolidation of wealth, and the behavioral legacies of COVID-19.
If such an explanation for the death of kindness seems dauntingly decentralized—as if meanness has metastasized in every organ of the republic’s body—there’s actually an empowering benefit to thinking in these terms. When we understand kindness to be dying in the trenches of daily life, it imbues discrete acts of kindness with targeted political force. It becomes a way to resist the increasingly popular call to “f**k your feelings” while establishing a habit of discourse rooted in the virtues of attentiveness and empathy.
As such, it invites everyday citizens to make the personal act political and to pursue reform through coalition building as an alternative to the echo chambers of hate. To appreciate how the recovery of kindness in the public sphere—one act at a time—is the absolute essential prerequisite for reclaiming a politics of virtue, we first need to better appreciate the deeper reasons for the demise of decency.
Reshaping Ethics
It’s an axiom that technologies reshape ethics. Particularly influential are digital technologies that eliminate the social interactions integral to market exchange. Consider the way so many people today buy a cup of coffee.
It’s surely convenient to walk into Starbucks and pick up your pre-ordered drink and leave. But the social costs are real. Buying a latté remotely becomes yet another way to scratch an itch without human contact, thereby bypassing the deepest origin of empathy: speaking to people. It becomes another daily act where you are not required to make eye contact, smile, ask how the day is going, show some patience or, in some cases, offer grace.
The impact is reciprocal. Employees on the other side of the counter fulfill app orders for people they do not see. Through screens and headphones, they offer goods and services to human abstractions. Any solidarity that might form among these workers is undermined by a division of labor fragmenting them into isolated automatons.
Try an experiment: Go get your coffee the old way. Walk into Starbucks during rush hour, go to the counter, say hello, smile, make small talk, and place your order. As you do so, notice the face of the person taking your order.
They’re not with you. They’re preoccupied with customers who are elsewhere. They fear making the app user wait—because that is not supposed to happen to the app user. And thus, they fear the imaginary person they might have to eventually confront in tangible form, a person to whom they will have to say, “your skinny latté isn’t yet made”—which is no way to start a conversation, and possibly the pretext for conflict.
Likewise, talk to anyone besides Jeff Bezos about what it’s like to work at a place like Amazon, a corporation dead set on abolishing human interaction. Amazon cut 70 percent of its workforce after a surge of hiring during COVID. It aims to stop hiring humans altogether by 2035. Bezos has $250 billion to his name and an assemblage of lackeys to engage every whim. But his employees are expected to be quiet, avoid distracting conversation. They are paid to deliver your latest impulse buy, yet another purchase made without the hassle of speech.
My point is this: Digital technologies that deliver goods without requiring us to interact with the humans who made, marketed, and delivered them are socially deleterious technologies that deny us the most accessible opportunities to be kind.
In No Mood to Be Kind
Historically, regular Americans have been unbothered by excessive wealth. In fact, they have generally been impressed by it. But tech wealth feels different. Unlike the hard commodities that long underscored American wealth—sugar, tobacco, cotton, oil, steel—tech wealth comes from undisclosed algorithms and is amassed by men that are (and this might sound unkind) awfully strange.
The ambition of these men and the algorithms they own aim less to capture our attention than to reduce it to near nothingness. They want to erode our critical awareness to the point where we can spend hours scrolling through micro-reels without wondering if doing so harms us. Today’s billionaires profit immensely from this flattening of attentiveness.
The deterioration of our attention span has not gone so far, however, as to render us oblivious to the resulting consolidation of wealth. As I write, my personalized news feed informs me that Elon Musk is about to be the world’s first trillionaire. It also tells me that working people are losing SNAP benefits, that the upper one percent owns 30.5 percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50 percent owns 2.5 percent, and that President Trump is holding Gatsby-like parties at Mar-a-Lago during a government shut down. Factor in rising health care premiums, inflation, increased utility costs, and tariff-driven price hikes, and it is obvious why regular hardworking people are in no mood to be kind.
Less obvious is where hardworking people direct their anger. Whatever it is that prevents regular people from blaming (much less going after) the billionaires is strange and complex (and worth its own essay). But there’s no denying that, generally speaking, the tech bros have successfully engineered their way around systemic public approbation. Those who have walked away with all the toys remain admired for their toys.
Whatever the reasons for this immunity, the upshot is tragic. Rather than confront the world’s fattest and slowest moving targets—conspicuous wealth—and demand accountability, Americans are going after each other. Call it the Parasite Effect. As with the most marginalized South Koreans in Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 tragicomic film, Parasite, Americans today fight over the dregs that the billionaires have placed before us.
Daily life has become a battleground. Understanding this reality explains a lot. When a man in a truck in Baytown, Texas recently shot me the finger as I prepared to turn right into the lane he was turning left into, I was baffled. But then I thought, wait a second: He thought I was going to pull in front of him.
It’s that simple. This man thought I was literally going to get ahead of him by putting my car in front of his. You see, as the billionaires build their yachts and sail off into a frictionless paradise, the rest of us turn minor concerns—your place in a line of cars—into high-stakes battles.
In short, hardworking people with so much in common are fighting with each other over how to get ahead, how to have a smidge more than the next guy, and how to get the biggest piece of the world’s smallest slice of pie. None of it is surprising. It’s what people do when they feel squeezed by scarcity. It’s a jungle out there. The tech bros designed it that way. And kindness will get you nowhere.
Social Distancing and Walking Clockwise
COVID-era regulations intensified the Parasite Effect. It gave us permission to police each other, and, wow, were we eager to do so. It’s true that from mask-wearing to social distancing to vaccination jabs, our anger was often legitimate. But, putting aside which procedures made sense and which ones did not, they collectively stoked an ongoing finger-pointing culture infused with righteousness and leeched of kindness.
Everything became a pretext for conflict—even movement. In Austin, where I live, city officials determined that if you used the Town Lake hiking trail, you had to walk clockwise. With that decree, Austinites had reason to get furious with neighbors for walking the “wrong” direction. Fury raged.
COVID also turned us inwards. It locked us in Zoom rooms where we could mute ourselves and block our screens. This forced introversion hit teenagers the hardest. Middle and high school is when young citizens first practice the art of adulting. They test the waters by looking people in the eye, listening, and talking to peers, teachers, coaches, and bosses. COVID robbed our kids of this essential sociological experience. As a college professor, I can assure you, it shows.
Every semester I teach an in-person college class with more 300 students. Before smart phones, I would walk into a din of conversation. Today, I walk into an auditorium of dead silence. Students are crammed together, looking down, alone together. Again, kindness loses when the easiest opportunities to express it are extinguished.
This interiority also fosters profound social anxiety. When a student misses a class, he will often email me for the notes. I suggest he get notes from classmates. He says he does not know any classmates. Start a conversation with one, I say. He replies, no, that would be terrifying. Which is probably true. My students have missed that stage of life where you learn to have face-to-face interactions, interactions that require, at the least, a modicum of attention, the urge to connect, an interest in finding common ground.
This isolation has also made us boring. We do not readily engage in conversations because, in many cases, we’ve yet to cultivate an interesting self to bring to a conversation. It’s hard to know how to present yourself to a stranger when your thoughts have been homogenized by TikTok videos. It’s hard to engage when you have no sense of self to enter into the engagement. Sociologists speak of a “coupling crisis.” I can see why.
If the masks and Zoom rooms we used during COVID kept us physically safe, they endangered the psychic development of a generation that currently lacks the ability to talk to each other. A conversation, at its core, demands attention and the ability to listen. Attention is a prerequisite for kindness. And therein lies another reason for the empathy we seem to have lost.
Seize the Power of Civility
The loss of kindness also has profound consequences for our political life. To understand this connection, we might look to the ratification of the US Constitution. On November 22, 1789, James Madison wrote Federalist #10, aiming to assure Americans that there would be no tyranny of the majority under the proposed constitution. His case hinged on two points: Americans had a multiplicity of interests, which led to factions, and these factions were so geographically dispersed that they would never be able to find each other, unify, and elevate a single interest into a majority.
Likewise, Madison wanted to assure the wealthy elites that, under the new Constitution, they would not be tyrannized by that rough-hewn majority known as the commoner. They would not be taxed into that oblivion known as the middle class. The people would never realize the theoretical depth of their power and, in turn, use it against the elite in the name of economic justice. They were, he assured the “billionaires” of the day, safe.
Madison could never make this argument today. People know how to find each other. (Technology, again.) As a result, regular Americans—those struggling to make ends meet—potentially hold immense power. More than they know. The billionaires are no longer safe.
What we don’t know is exactly what’s preventing us from seizing that power: the power of civility. I truly believe that’s the root of it. On a fundamental level, the main factor preventing us from building majorities around shared political interests that favor the many over the few are the toxic habits I witnessed on my book tour: mean, rude, aggressive, uncouth behavior toward fellow citizens who share the same struggles.
It might seem simplistic to argue that a more empathetic political process begins with being kind. What might happen if the majority of Americans figured out how to make kindness cool, decency a radical virtue, commonality common. Why might that then lead to a real reason to fear empathy?
Because kindness softens us into unity; it is in itself a commonality, and it leads us to other commonalities. Even Trump said after a meeting with New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, “We agree on a lot more than I would have thought.” We tend to think that we are deeply polarized—as if we are on opposite end zones of a football field—when we are in fact on opposite 40-yard lines. The hateful rhetoric just makes us think that we’re further apart than we are. It instills ideologically the distance that, in Madison’s day, existed geographically.
So overcome the distance, choose to be kind. It’s an act of rebellion. And the implications for human happiness and democratic politics are immense. Maybe even enough to save us.