Read the kind things, the good news, I double dog dare you
Kindness (even just believing in it) can help fight evil
Did you know that as people, we’re more conditioned to focus on negative things than positive?
News headlines take advantage of this all the time. All. The. Time. We try pretty actively to lean away from this at our own paper. We aren’t always successful and it’s not always possible. Sometimes the news is just . . . bad.
But thanks to data, we also see the things that people lean toward when they read are stories online. It’s crime. It’s big mess-ups. It’s the loss of people we care about in our community.
When a headline makes someone feel upset or helpless, full of fear or outraged, people read the story.
That doesn’t really flow well into kindness.
That’s why as people, we also have to purposefully choose kindness whenever we can.
That goes for ourselves and for our community, right?
We have to think:
How can I be kinder?
How can my community be kinder?
What does it mean to live in a kind community?
Does it make you happier?
They are all pretty correlated.
KINDNESS AND BELIEVING IN KINDNESS ACTUALLY HELPS YOU FIGHT EVIL AND ALSO MAKES US HAPPIER.
Seriously. Stay with me here, okay?
There’s a piece in the Greater Good by Kira M. Newman who writes,
“This may be a fraught question for some of us today, as we see evidence of unkindness (and worse) in the news at every turn. But according to the World Happiness Report 2025, how benevolent our society is—and, separately, how benevolent we think our society is—matters for everyone’s well-being.”
That report comes from a global Gallup World Poll. Pollsters talked to 1,000 in each country. The ranking came from the average of the participants’ satisfaction with their lives.
The United States had been #23. It is now #24. There are 150 countries included in the poll.
One of the goals of the research is to notice things. Why are no top industrial countries the happiest? Why did the U.S. fall a place? What are the happiest countries and why?
Well, this year, they also ranked countries according to kindness and generosity. So how much people volunteer, give to charity, help strangers and also how much people believed others would do kind things (return a wallet, a coat, a cellphone).
The study authors wrote, “Believing that others would return a wallet predicts a larger boost to life satisfaction than a doubling of income. Believing that your lost wallet would very likely be returned is accompanied by life satisfaction that is higher by more than three-quarters of a point on the 0–10 scale. This effect is almost twice as large as being unemployed. It is also higher than the negative effects of comparably measured expected harms from mental health issues or violent crime.”
How kind we believe our community is makes us happier or less happy. It makes us more satisfied with our lives or less.
According to the researchers,” what we expect our neighbors to do after finding a wallet represents how we feel about our local social context, and people who think a neighbor would return it also tend to say they have someone to count on in life,” Newman writes. “Our predictions for strangers reflect our feelings about the broader social fabric, and they’re linked to our sense of social trust. Our expectations of police officers, a proxy for our public institutions, vary the most between countries.”
And here’s the thing: the U.S. ranks really well on a lot of those markers. We donate. We help strangers. We volunteer. We know most of our neighbors are going to turn in a wallet.
But as a country we are also not super trusting of the police and of strangers.
My daughter has lost her wallet three times in her life. All in major cities. Every single time she got it back. Only once was the cash taken. That’s pretty amazing, right?
Actually, it’s pretty common.
The correlation between the happiness of a country and the belief in kindness existing is also pretty strong.
“Meanwhile, Nordic residents, who are some of the happiest, are also among the most likely to believe that misplacing a wallet won’t end in cancelling your credit card and getting a new ID,” Newman writes.
She also lists the “top five countries for each form of kindness:
Donating: Indonesia, Myanmar, Ukraine, U.K., Iceland;
Volunteering: Indonesia, Liberia, Kenya, Tajikistan, Nigeria;
Helping a stranger: Jamaica, Liberia, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, Sierra Leone;
Expecting a neighbor to return a wallet: Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Austria;
Expecting a stranger to return a wallet: Norway, Iran, Algeria, Netherlands, Finland;
Expecting police to return a wallet: Norway, Finland, Germany, Austria, New Zealand.”
If a country had strong social support nets, there was more trust in the wallet test and less volunteerism. Where police are the least trusted, more people tended to help strangers. Interesting, right?
But what’s the most interesting to me (and hopefully to you) is this:
“If we focus on the good and the kindness in others, this research suggests, it might help us feel better (which, it’s also worth noting, may help us take action against the evil and cruelty that does exist),” Newman writes.
Believing in good helps us feel better. Believing in good helps us be brave enough to take action against evil.
Believing in good sound a little childish, right? It isn’t. It’s real and it’s powerful. I hope you not only see some good today, but I hope you notice it, too.
This is just lovely..... We need this today. Thank you !
Thank you. I bet if Bar Harbor were a country, we'd be right up at the top of those poll results!