Last week, I was chatting with a friend. Talking about the unseemly brutishness of President Trump as well as the occasional rudeness one finds in everyday social life, she said something that stuck with me: “I will just never understand a person’s inability to be kind.” Whether thinking of the uncourteous self-centered style of Trump or the everyday ways people snub or reject others, she just feels a fundamental dissonance over how people can fail to show kindness to others.
I thought this was such a great insight. For whatever one thinks about politics or social issues, whatever one believes about God and religion, whatever one prioritizes with their time and talents, I feel like most everyone could agree that mutual kindness is a fair minimum standard for all members of the human family.
I don’t know that we’re going to solve the quagmires of social respect anytime soon; there’s no quick fix for Twitter trolling, echo chambers, radicalization, and more. But I think there’s a major root cause of our lack of kindness that needs confrontation: busyness.
We are becoming increasingly busy people. The moments of quiet or stillness in a modern life are few and far between. Our screens are streaming something; our phones are buzzing and sounding with new notifications; our speakers and earbuds are pounding with music. Even when we’re “resting” or “relaxing,” we’re often still multi-tasking, putting a show on in the background while skimming through notifications and updating ourselves on our feeds. This is true at work, too, where many of our jobs are connected to email inboxes that pile up with new messages at alarming rates, and in ways that follow us home through our constant connectivity.
I am seeing more and more instances of this busyness causing people to act rudely and often to ignore people. I think witnessing others’ busyness often helps me to be more patient and compassionate toward them, even when they are rude or ignore me, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still hurt when it happens.
For some reason, busyness seems to have become a legitimate and acceptable excuse for being unkind to others. I think of Jim Gaffigan’s reflection about how having five kids can sometimes become an implicit RSVP of “no” to various events and invitations because sometimes, logistically, a family of seven just can’t make it to something. But that type of context comes from a much different place than our modern busyness, which seems more focused on a person as an individual with an eye to personal needs and priorities that doesn’t look outward as easily.
When you apply for a job or inquire about a position -- and even sometimes when you do a job interview and meet employers personally -- you may never hear anything back. When you get to a counter at a business, you often aren’t greeted or welcomed but just treated at another task to complete. When you text or call a friend to meet up, you may never get a reply. Somehow, efficiency has leapfrogged kindness, and human encounter is the victim.
We need to confront our habits and ask how the way we are acting is impacting relationships -- is my action or lack thereof hurting the way I connect to others? Or am I taking intentional steps to create, sustain, and develop human relationships? I think first of the massively high numbers that populate people’s inboxes and apps. Are all of those notifications being answered? Are you leaving some unchecked or unread? Is that inaction hurtful or neglectful to that person and the relationship?
I don’t have a solution for Snapchat because watching teenagers blitz through screens with the little ghost almost literally makes me sick. But when it comes to a clogged inbox, maybe it involves adding an auto-reply explaining that you are behind on emails and may not catch up until a certain date, to at least give the sender a moment to know they have been heard and will receive a response. Maybe it involves a certain window of time daily or semi-daily to more carefully review notifications and new messages and to reply to each person with some thoughtfulness. Maybe it involves changing one’s phone number or email address and starting from scratch with a message to all one’s contacts that you’re starting over and hoping not to fall behind them.
I am not out to demonize college professors, public figures, and other people in consistently high demand. And I’m certainly a bit of a nobody with underpopulated inboxes and a dearth of notifications relative to peers. I just want a pause-and-think moment where we establish better standards for our communication that more closely match the courtesy and kindness of the increasingly bygone eras of telephone calls, face-to-face meetings, and the less mediated communications.
And I hope I never reach a point where people’s outreach to me outstrips my desire and ability to respond, though it sometimes feels inevitable with the cacophony of notifications always bearing down. If our connectivity is so ubiquitous and potent that we are becoming too busy to be kind, the ends of efficiency and productivity no longer justify the means that such technology enables. We have to stop ourselves from being so busy that we ignore people; we cannot be too busy to be kind.
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