Today, the world appears more hostile than ever. Wars, political unrest, poverty, geopolitical tensions, genocides, climate catastrophes, an unforgiving economic order, and discrimination on racial, religious and parochial lines — it seems like mass destruction and suffering are here to stay.
Even if you want to remain “apolitical” and tune out from these problems, you cannot escape the hostilities of modern life. You probably dislike your job and feel it offers no purpose. You are unable to keep in touch with your friends because of your busy lives. Social media algorithms seem to prioritise division and reward toxicity, using your attention as currency in exchange for conflict.
Leading an unfulfilling life in what looks like a world on fire would catch you wishing for a break, or any act of kindness or compassion to instil hope in you. However, the state of the world makes it difficult to give the same kindness back to an unfair world that wears you down.
It is easy to remain apathetic to the suffering of others when you are forced into survival mode just to get by. Tragedy, conflict, and injustice are constantly fed to you through several channels.
When suffering becomes daily news, you tend to retreat into self-preservation and apathy, because you would rather desensitise yourself to the world around you than care about it and fuel your despair further, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
However, it is exactly in these testing times that your empathy and kindness become essential. Corrupt governments, greedy businessmen, and anti-social elements not only thrive in our despair and apathy but actively fuel it.
Our indifference to human suffering allows religious intolerance, caste and gender discrimination, exploitation, crony capitalism, corruption, apartheid, and genocide to continue. When kindness is absent in our society, selfishness and greed take its place.
Certainly, allowing that to happen would not benefit any of us, even those who profit from it for now. Our world would be stripped of its empathy, where people see one another not as brothers but as obstacles, competitors, or pawns.
In such a society, power replaces compassion, and fear replaces trust. Communities fracture into tribes of suspicion. Inequality hardens into apathy. Moral degradation becomes normalised and even celebrated. The distance between rich and poor, privileged and marginalised, grows wider, until our entire society collapses under the weight of its own cruelty.
One look into human history will inform us that even the greatest of civilisations have not fallen from external threats, but from the erosion of their collective conscience.
Therefore, our survival as a species is contingent on one value — kindness. Not performative gestures that garner applause, or big global movements led by messianic figures, but a profound love and concern for the well-being of fellow human beings.
The novelist George Eliot observed, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
Thus, in today’s fractured societies, where conflict, inequality, and loneliness are widespread, kindness begins with a small but brave step to act with compassion when indifference is easier.
It took a monk’s self-immolation for the war in Vietnam to end. It took a gruesome act of gang-rape in Delhi to jolt India’s citizens to stand up for the safety of women. It took the Holocaust for the establishment of universal human rights.
This World Kindness Day, let’s ask ourselves one question: Should it take a bigger catastrophe to awaken our collective conscience once again?