Congratulations, by the Way by George Saunders

I talk a lot about having been a camp counselor and how good that was for me. Being in a culture in which the coolest girls were the kindest, most helpful ones was paradise for me—hence my particular camp's nickname being "the Heavenly World."

See, also: my love for cultish communities, my literal book based on my love for summer camp, nature being dose-dependent, books that make you want to throw your phone in the river. Even now, I wear my 10-years-attendance signet ring and consider my camp girls some of my closest, most lifelong friends.

As much as I'd love to be a successful, formidable force of grit and endurance and distinction, I do hope that people think of me as fundamentally kind. I don't have to think about being kind. I just am, but it's one of those taboo qualities you almost can't talk about because the self-awareness of it detracts from its potency.

But hey, I love writing about human behavior so I have signed myself up for this. Which brings me to a question of mine: if you go backward and analyze your reasons for being kind, have you ruined it?

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On that, I have three points.

One: Most kind people are kind for similar reasons; it's just the presence of self-awareness that throws you into the meta trap. So it's not very useful to think "Oh gosh, maybe I'm not doing this for the right reasons because I'm thinking about it too much."
Two: Impact matters more than intention, and thought tends to follow action.
Three: As I've been thinking so much about lately, all meaning is made in hindsight. Narrative patterns are all looking backwards, which means any trait you laud in yourself—like being kind—is subject to motivational analysis. Some people just don't engage in it, which is probably better.

I think a lot about the strength that lies in softness and gentleness when it would be easier to harden, detach, or lash out. It's not as visible as the stiffening into Stoicism, and some people don't view it as strength at all. So it's a strength without any external validation, in my opinion.

I think it's often harder to know how unkind or selfish people can be and still choose to look at them in the best, most generous possible light. Give people a chance to surprise you, maintain your sense of self, and always pick the kindest option.

Is That Virtue-Signaling? Are We Kind for the Right Reasons?

I've also been thinking a lot about how many of us get trapped in our reasons why we want to be good—whatever that means to you—and whether or not they're accurate. Most of us think of ourselves as heroes, with a baked-in need for control. Some of us isolate to avoid the messiness of moral dissonance and clashing systems.

Complex questions brought up by essayists like David Foster Wallace—"Isn't my need to be a good person fundamentally selfish anyway because I'm hoping it means someone will love me? Doesn't that make me a bad one, or at least narcissistic?"—are rarely resolved by the unsatisfying advice to just stop thinking about it. For me, I've taken comfort in the frameworks introduced by thinkers like Krista Tippett—simple/complex/simple—and ironed out in fiction like Franny and Zooey. (Seek simplicity on the other side of complexity.)

If you get trapped in the complexity like DFW, you might believe that if someone saw the real inner you, they'd know you were somehow lacking this pure, internal drive you suspect others have that motivates them to be good, kind, or generous. That you're only doing it for belonging or the need for individual clarity.

Basically, My Question: If You Think Too Hard About Being Kind, Do You Lose It?

But I think the only difference affecting your belief in what's genuine is that you might be aware that your brain holds multiple contradictory truths at once, so you know there are other clashing views that might taint your desire to help, connect, whatever. We are not nearly as cohesive as we like to think.

Maybe you have a crush on the person asking, maybe you're trying to prove to yourself that you're a moral person, maybe it gives you the sense of accomplishment within your day, maybe it's a mental defense against some imaginary argument. It doesn't make the action or the end result any less real, although it gives you pause.

I love evolutionary psychology for that reason and I'm constantly reading about how our brains react to pain and endurance, kindness and gratitude, nature, solitude, conversation, the arts, etc,. I love neuroaesthetics and the study of beauty because nearly every good in the universe serves some baseline function for us to get us to tomorrow, and understanding that—and internalizing it—can dissolve (I think) some of those "am I doing this for the right reasons?" woes. It's all survival based, whether you're conscious of it or not, but that doesn't change the feeling.

Even if you have to force yourself to do something good, it activates your brain in a thousand good ways (which I will explain another time so I don't dive into an extra thousand-word tangent.) A lot of narrative, heroic construction, sense of self, etc,. is in hindsight anyway.

I've realized I analyze just about everything on multiple levels when I think about it. Each of my reviews threads probably at least three of these.

My Usual Levels of Analysis

FICTION (others' stories)

PHILOSOPHY (theory)

NEUROSCIENCE (science)

PERSONAL (my story)

And a lot of my personal peace is found in the genuine belief that out of everyone around me and everyone who's passed through my life: everyone is doing the very best they can with the limited information they have at their disposal. Cue the Marcus Aurelius.

And because I believe that, there is no reason for me not to be kind. (I'm not saying I'm never unkind. I can be casually, accidentally cruel in the name of clarity, but I do try to correct that, even if the attempt is a total fumble.)

All in all, I've mulled over this accusation we love to throw around—that of virtue-signaling. Sometimes, the line between authenticity and manipulation feels like it's just that of awareness, an existential trap for anyone who likes to interrogate their motivations, process, and way of being. So the way out is only to believe that your action matters anyway, overshadowing any murkiness of your intent—or at least enmeshing it within a greater truth of your own ability to shape yourself as you want.

And fundamentally, regardless of intention, the studies back it up too with fun facts like:

• Impact tends to matter more than intent, relationally.
• Kindness is dose-dependent, meaning that the more you give, the more you get.
• The indicator of a relationship or friendship working out is whether or not the people involve respond to each others' "bids" for connection.
• Defensiveness and resentment are the worst signifiers of a relationship failing (in any sense.)
• Our biggest regrets tend to be social.
• And our biggest regrets tend to be the missed opportunities for kindness.

And even if you do need to look at kindness in a Machiavellian or agentic sense—how does this benefit me?—you can at least think of kindness as primarily disarming to someone who expects you to lash out, or as being the active choice to shape a sense of self that feels better and more satisfying to your internal compass.

Does kindness need this much analysis? Absolutely not. Should it have this much analysis? Maybe not. But if you've started thinking about it—if you've gotten trapped in the spiral of wondering why or how you've stitched yourself together—then this is a logical path through to the other side: simplicity again.

You just have to be okay with someone getting you wrong or assuming you're weak, that you haven't thought about your decision to be kind thoroughly. Life has significantly improved for me since I've gotten so much better at allowing people to get me wrong, and not feeling the need to correct them.

Which Brings Me to the Speech

During camp orientation, one of our directors read this out loud and it's always stuck with me. I can't say the speech was a turning point for me because these are thoughts I've always had simmering, but I can't say for certain that I'd put them into words before or heard them articulated. It fits with Meditations and Four Thousand Weeks and other books about what's worth doing as a limited person with limited time. It sees the choice as being fundamentally active and autonomous.

I can't say it's always benefited me as a practice, as it's sometimes only caused me pain, but it has made me a very deeply consistent person, which is a quality I love about myself. Being kind is something you can do no matter what, and it exists independently of someone's reaction to it. So if it's not reciprocated, who cares? You're the architect of your own fulfillment, baby.

Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness

Down through the ages, a traditional form has evolved for this type of speech, which is: Some old fart, his best years behind him, who, over the course of his life, has made a series of dreadful mistakes (that would be me), gives heartfelt advice to a group of shining, energetic young people, with all of their best years ahead of them (that would be you).

And I intend to respect that tradition.

Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back, what do you regret?” And they’ll tell you. Sometimes, as you know, they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked. Sometimes, even when you’ve specifically requested they not tell you, they’ll tell you.

So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.

But here’s something I do regret:

In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.

So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?”--that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”

Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.


And then—they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing. One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.

End of story.

Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her. 

But still. It bothers me.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:


What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?

Those who were kindest to you, I bet.


It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

Now, the million-dollar question: What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?

Here’s what I think:

Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk--dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure—for you, but not for me). 

Now, we don’t really believe these things—intellectually we know better—but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and
they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.

So, the second million-dollar question: How might we DO this? How might we become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional, etc., etc?

Well, yes, good question.

Unfortunately, I only have three minutes left.

So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter.
Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition—recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.

Because kindness, it turns out, is hard—it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include...well, everything.

One thing in our favor: some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish—how illogical, really.
We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit. That’s one reason your parents are so proud and happy today. One of their fondest dreams has come true: you have accomplished something difficult and tangible that has enlarged you as a person and will make your life better, from here on in, forever.

Congratulations, by the way.


When young, we’re anxious‚—understandably—to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you‚ in particular you, of this generation—-may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can...

And this is actually o.k.
If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously—as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and
the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really:
selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf—seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things—travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop)—but as you do, to the extent that you can,
err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality—your soul, if you will—is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Theresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and
we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful. 

Congratulations, Class of 2013.

I wish you great happiness, all the luck in the world, and a beautiful summer.