The title is exactly what I mean – we stopped being nice. “We” here referring to humanity as a whole.
Every day I log into the news and social media and all I see is another dig at someone. We criticise our leaders for leading and making decisions, we ourselves would never want the responsibility of. We criticise how parents are coping between trying to work productively 8 hours a day from home, while ensuring that the kids do schooling – and this all happens to the rhythm of overloaded networks, stressed teachers, bosses who still require full attention and no commute for respite.
We judge celebrities for being in relationships, and then not being in relationships. We judge our peers for having kids too young or too old. We judge if you have a mortgage or if you don’t. We judge how you look – too fat / too thin (there never is a middle ground is there?); how your house looks (cluttered / too minimalistic / too much colour / not enough colour); your choice in animals – truth is we judge on every single little thing we can.
We just can’t get along and understand that people have a certain amount of resources and time and they are doing the absolute best they can with that. I am purposefully ignoring that sector of the population that choose to commit crimes or choose a life where they waste resources – they are seriously not the largest percentage. We give them too much credit.
For some reason we take the spotlight of all the good in the world and focus on the crap. We focus on the hate. We focus on the negative and all the pain. We glorify those that commit hate crimes – we give them so much exposure and a platform to spew their vileness a little further in the world.
We look for so many reasons to be unhappy and we focus so intently on the 1% that we have forgotten what it is to be thankful. We have forgotten all the good in our lives. We have stopped being nice, because we do not want to be left out and thereby bring attention to ourselves. Attracting attention just means that we would become a target.
We stopped being nice, and I no longer want to be a part of that.
Neuroses Undefined 