Media, social or otherwise, tends to surface bad news: things you don’t normally notice that make you sad or angry when you do.
These three stories are the opposite: good news I rarely notice. They also apply to most people reading this.
My friends aren’t dead
One night in Wisconsin, I dreamed my friend Xuan was dead.
The sky was dark gray and cloudless. A crowd of silhouettes whispered the news. I talked to them yesterday, I thought. Why are they dead? How are they dead?
I woke up in a panic and checked Facebook. As Xuan’s page loaded, I remembered that dreams weren’t real. Death was real, but not this particular death.
I felt amazing the next day. I kept thinking about whatever Xuan was doing at that moment: studying, rehearsing, eating lunch. We weren’t even all that close, but it was amazing to know they still drew breath.
If I dreamed about another friend dying tonight, I think I’d wake up feeling the same way: profound gratitude for their existence.
Therefore, I should feel that way now.
I just spent a few minutes meditating on the existence of random people I know. They are all out there, somewhere, being themselves. Andrew is repairing someone’s nose. Dan is playing with his baby. Britney is collecting adventures to blog about. What fantastic news!
I wish I could more easily tell my friends that I love the fact of their existence. This essay is one attempt; so is this one.
My neighbors would fight ICE
My wife and I wanted to get ice cream, but the line was too long. San Diego has a lot of long lines. The beaches are crowded. Rush hour starts at 3:30. People people people.
Despite my self-professed humanism, I still get antsy in crowds. But that night, as we gave up on ice cream, I thought about the crowds of Minneapolis. Masked gunmen invaded the city and shoved people into unmarked vans, but the crowds of Minneapolis slowed them down. They stood in the snow and blocked the streets. They whistled and filmed and followed vans full of people who might kill them.
San Diego, like almost every U.S. city, is a liberal place. If ICE came here tomorrow, it would look like a sunny Minneapolis. Instead of hogging the ice cream, the crowds would be making ICE scream. (I’m not sorry.)
Just like I know my friends are out there, I know my neighbors would step up if times became extreme. This isn’t true of all times and places, but it seems to be true more often than not, and I certainly think it’s true of my 21st-century American city.
You’d like most people if you got to know them
If you traveled to most places, and spent some time living with the locals, you’d probably come away liking those places and people. Some of this is the mere exposure effect; some of it is because most people are friendly and hospitable.1 (“We treat guests well” is one of those things every culture thinks about itself, but that just makes it a human universal, like storing sewing supplies in cookie tins.)
More than any generation in history, we live surrounded by strangers. It doesn’t help that the most visible strangers are often people living on the street, in situations that make it hard to be hospitable or pleasant.
But so often, a stranger is a friend you haven’t met.2 Or at least a person as real and important as the people you know. If circumstances brought you together — ICE invasion, AA meeting, playoff game in a bar — you’d probably get along fine.
Conclusion: You should like most people now.
I wrote more about this idea here, as it applies to charity.