The cashier at the grocery store is moving slowly. You can see the exhaustion in the way she handles each item, the mechanical precision of someone who stopped thinking about what their hands are doing hours ago. There’s a line forming behind you. The people in that line are getting restless, their impatience becoming a physical presence in the air.
You have a choice in this moment that you probably won’t register as a choice. You can treat this interaction as a transaction to be completed as efficiently as possible. Or you can treat it as a brief intersection of two human lives, both of which contain depths and struggles invisible to the other.
The difference between these two approaches seems small. A smile. A “how are you doing today?” said like you might actually want to know the answer. A moment of patience when she drops something and has to start the scanning process over. These gestures cost you maybe thirty seconds.
But what do they cost her to receive? And what do they cost you to withhold?
Kindness is the most underestimated force in human life. Not kindness as performed niceness or strategic relationship management, but kindness as the simple recognition that the person in front of you is a person in front of you. That their experience of this moment is as real as yours. That their internal life is as complex and difficult and worthy of consideration as your own.
This recognition should be automatic. It isn’t.
Most of us move through our days treating people as functions rather than as people. The cashier is a checkout function. The person who answers your phone call is a problem-resolution function. The driver who cuts you off is an obstacle function. The person who disagrees with you on social media is an opinion-correction function.
We reduce full human beings to the single aspect of them that intersects with our current need or frustration. And in doing so, we make the world smaller, harsher, and more lonely than it needs to be.
The Stoic philosopher Hierocles observed that humans have a natural tendency to care more about those close to them than about strangers. This isn’t a moral failing but a feature of how human attachment works. Yet he argued that wisdom involves consciously extending some portion of that care beyond our immediate circles.
The practice isn’t about loving strangers as much as you love your family. It’s about recognizing that the stranger’s humanity is as real as your family’s humanity, even if your obligations differ. Their pain hurts them as much as your loved one’s pain hurts your loved one. Their dignity matters as much to them as your dignity matters to you.
This recognition changes how you move through the world. Cruelty toward strangers doesn’t just harm them. It damages something in yourself. Every time you treat someone as less than human, you practice becoming someone who treats people as less than human. That practice eventually affects everyone in your life, not just strangers.
Consider how you speak to the person who made an error processing your order. How you respond to the driver who didn’t see you and nearly caused an accident. How you treat the person whose political views infuriate you. How you regard the homeless person asking for money. How you interact with anyone whose existence momentarily inconveniences you.
In each of these moments, you’re making a choice about what kind of person you want to be. Not what kind of person you want to appear to be, but what kind of person you’re actually becoming through your accumulated choices about how to treat people who can’t punish you for treating them poorly.
This is the test that reveals character. Not how you treat people who have power over you, not how you treat people you’re trying to impress, but how you treat people who are powerless to affect your life in any meaningful way.
Do you default to kindness or do you default to indifference? When someone is struggling and that struggle inconveniences you, do you extend patience or resentment? When someone makes a mistake that affects you, do you respond with understanding or contempt?
Your answers to these questions in unobserved moments define you more accurately than your carefully managed behavior in situations where you’re being evaluated.
Marcus Aurelius wrote extensively about “philanthropia,” which translates roughly as love of humanity. But his conception of this love wasn’t sentimental. He was describing a disciplined practice of treating people well even when, especially when, they don’t deserve it by any conventional measure.
He knew from direct experience that people are often foolish, selfish, and frustrating. As emperor, he dealt daily with incompetence, betrayal, and mediocrity. Yet he insisted on responding to human weakness with patience rather than cruelty, with understanding rather than contempt.
Not because people earned this response, but because responding with kindness to people who haven’t earned it is what separates wisdom from mere competence, character from mere cleverness.
The world is full of people who know how to succeed. It’s desperately short of people who know how to be kind while succeeding, who know how to achieve their goals without leaving casual cruelty in their wake.
But kindness is hard precisely because it requires seeing past your immediate frustration to someone’s full humanity. It requires remembering that everyone you encounter is fighting battles you know nothing about. That the rude person might be dealing with grief. That the incompetent person might be learning. That the slow person might be exhausted. That the difficult person might be afraid.
You don’t know their circumstances. You don’t know what brought them to this moment where they’re frustrating you. You don’t know what they’re carrying that’s invisible to you.
This uncertainty should make you cautious about judgment and generous with patience. Instead, for most people, it makes them confident in their assessment and stingy with understanding. They assume the worst about strangers’ motivations while demanding that strangers assume the best about their own.
The cruelest irony is that the people most quick to explain away their own bad behavior with context and circumstance are often the least willing to imagine that others might also be acting from context and circumstance rather than character defects.
This asymmetry creates a world where everyone is defending their own complexity while reducing everyone else to simple categories. Good drivers and bad drivers. Smart people and idiots. Productive people and lazy people. People who matter and people who are in the way.
Kindness dissolves these categories. Not by pretending everyone is wonderful, but by recognizing that everyone is human. That the categories we use to dismiss people are usually failures of imagination rather than accurate assessments of character.
The Stoics had a practice they called “the view from above,” where you imagine seeing human life from a great distance. From this perspective, individual conflicts look small. Personal slights seem meaningless. The urgent frustrations of daily life reveal themselves as temporary and trivial.
But more importantly, from this view, you see that everyone is struggling with something. Everyone is doing their best with whatever understanding, capacity, and resources they currently possess. Everyone is trying to navigate existence with incomplete information and limited ability.
This doesn’t excuse harmful behavior. It doesn’t mean you should tolerate mistreatment. It means that contempt for human limitation is itself a limitation. That cruelty toward others’ failures is often cruelty toward the parts of yourself you haven’t learned to accept.
When you’re harsh toward someone’s incompetence, you’re often expressing fear of your own incompetence. When you’re contemptuous of someone’s weakness, you’re often defending against awareness of your own weakness. When you’re impatient with someone’s confusion, you’re often avoiding the truth of how confused you are about your own life.
Kindness toward others begins with kindness toward yourself. Not the false kindness of excusing your own bad behavior, but the genuine kindness of accepting your limitations without self-contempt. When you stop berating yourself for not being perfect, you become less invested in others’ imperfection as evidence of their inadequacy.
But even if you haven’t achieved this self-compassion, even if you’re still harsh toward your own limitations, you can practice kindness toward others. You can choose to respond to human weakness with patience even when you don’t fully understand why you’re making that choice.
This practice changes you over time. Not immediately, not dramatically, but gradually and fundamentally. Each small act of kindness toward someone who doesn’t have to matter to you is training in seeing people as they are rather than as functions in your life.
The barista who makes your coffee isn’t just a coffee-production function. They’re someone whose day you can make slightly better or slightly worse through how you treat them. The person who serves you food isn’t just a food-delivery function. They’re someone who will remember either your courtesy or your rudeness long after you’ve forgotten the interaction entirely.
Every person you encounter today will have their day shaped in small ways by how you choose to treat them. Most of these people you’ll never see again. Your interaction with them has no consequences for you. But it has consequences for them, and it has consequences for who you’re becoming through your accumulated choices about how to treat powerless strangers.
This is where character is actually built. Not in the big decisions where you’re being watched, but in the small moments where no one would know if you were cruel except the person receiving your cruelty and yourself living with who you become through choosing cruelty.
Musonius Rufus taught that the wise person practices virtue not for reputation but for the sake of becoming virtuous. He argued that genuine goodness shows up most clearly in situations where there’s no external reward for being good and no external punishment for being bad.
These are the moments that reveal whether your kindness is strategic or genuine. Whether you treat people well because it serves your interests or because you’ve decided that treating people well is itself the interest you want to serve.
The world doesn’t require your kindness. People will survive your indifference. You can move through life treating everyone as functions and obstacles and still achieve everything you define as success. You can be harsh, impatient, contemptuous, and cruel to everyone who can’t punish you for it, and face minimal consequences.
But you’ll build a smaller self in the process. You’ll create a life where connection is shallow, where interactions are transactions, where people are means rather than ends. You’ll succeed at whatever you’re trying to achieve while failing at becoming someone capable of genuine human connection.
Because genuine connection requires seeing people as they are rather than as what they can do for you. And you can’t train yourself to see people as people only in relationships that matter to you while seeing everyone else as functions. The habit generalizes. If you practice reducing most people to their utility, you’ll eventually reduce everyone to their utility.
Kindness is a practice that builds capacity for connection. Each time you extend patience to someone whose struggle inconveniences you, you’re training yourself to hold space for complexity rather than collapsing it into simple judgments. Each time you respond to someone’s limitation with understanding rather than contempt, you’re building your own capacity to navigate a world full of limited people, including yourself.
This practice doesn’t make you a saint. It makes you workable. Someone who can cooperate with imperfect people, navigate conflict without destroying relationships, maintain connection despite disappointment, participate in community despite others’ flaws.
These capacities matter more than most of what we optimize for. Your career success means little if you can’t maintain relationships. Your achievements feel hollow if everyone around you is just a function you’ve learned to manipulate. Your accumulation of wealth or status or recognition provides no protection against the loneliness that comes from treating people as means to your ends.
Show kindness. Not because people deserve it, not because it will be reciprocated, not because it advances your interests, but because you deserve to become someone capable of kindness even when there’s no immediate reason for it.
The world has enough people who are strategic in their kindness, who extend courtesy only where it serves them. What’s rare and valuable are people who have trained themselves to see others’ humanity even in moments where that humanity is invisible or inconvenient.
These people don’t make the world better through grand gestures. They make it better through accumulation of small moments where they chose to treat someone as if they mattered.
You are surrounded by opportunities to practice this every single day. In every interaction with every person, you’re choosing what kind of person to be.
Choose kindness. Not the performed kind that serves your image, but the genuine kind that serves your character. The kind that costs you nothing but transforms everything about how you move through the world.
📝 Today’s Stoic Gameplan
Practice seeing people: In your next five interactions today, make deliberate eye contact and remember you’re engaging with a full human being, not a function. Notice what changes in how you treat them.
Extend unearned patience: When someone’s incompetence or slowness frustrates you today, practice responding as if you knew they were dealing with a crisis you can’t see. Don’t perform this patience, just practice it.
Be kind where it doesn’t matter: Find someone today whose goodwill has zero impact on your life. A stranger. Someone you’ll never see again. Treat them with the same consideration you’d want shown to someone you love.
Notice your defaults: Pay attention to how you treat people when no one is watching and there are no consequences for being harsh. These moments reveal who you’re actually becoming.
Kindness isn’t weakness. It’s the ultimate strength, the ability to treat people well even when you don’t have to, even when they don’t deserve it, even when no one would blame you for being harsh.
The world you want to live in is built one interaction at a time, by people who choose kindness even in moments where cruelty would be easier.
Stay stoic,
SW
Just starting my substack journey and this is just the type of post I wanted to read. Thank you - choose kindness!
Nice to learn the difference between performing kindness and practising kindness