In the 21st Century, genuine Kindness can be just one click away

I woke up to a bad mood yesterday. It was one of those days when your inner monologue assumes the persona of the nagging mom archetype, constantly asking condescendingly: "What are you doing with your life?!"

I was feeling pretty good about myself lately; not in the Kanye West-way, but having gone through seriously heavy things last year of which my former self would have thought that stuff like that would crush me; but quite the opposite — everything that would have easily annoyed or saddened me before seemed so small afterwards since I’ve really seen some sh!t happen. Now this doesn’t mean that everything was peaches and cream from that point on, but that episode had turned many things into a proper perspective:
when I looked death in the eye, I saw life. 

So I had considered myself to have reached a calmer, healthier mindset. Yet on that particular day, I suddenly felt low. Especially regarding my work. Am I doing enough? Am I approaching the things I do from the right direction? What’s its worth? The monkey mind — if you want to use the buddhist term — rampaged.  

Then I did something what I had considered to be a bad idea while having these moods.
I did it anyway, as I felt an urge to be somewhat productive. I checked my emails.  

I deleted the usual amount of spam, checked relevant deadlines, etc. And then I found, nestled between newsletters I should really unsubscribe from, an email from a name I couldn’t recognise.  

Maybe you can’t relate to that or will find it cheesy, but in that particular moment, this message was worth more to me than all whales voting on one of my posts on Steemit. Especially since I had rather neglected my Flickr for a year or so, thus there’s not a lot happening over there at the moment, and my visibility should be near zero. And this person didn’t just send me a message on Flickr or leave a comment under one of my pictures, but bothered to check my email address and send his message to me directly. That’s like the 21st Century equivalent to a handwritten letter, if you ask me.  

Now I’m not proposing to you that you should attach your self-esteem to what anyone says ever. That would be like a shortcut to the end of a rainbow only to realise after a while that you’re actually not there at all, thus having to chase its tail again. Some people can do this charade their whole life, don’t be one of them. 

The person constantly seeking compliment after compliment is attached to his own inner deficit rather than having a connection to the messages they might carry; in fact he’d hardly be able to actually receive them, they just fall into his inner abyss, thus making him dependent on a regular feed to keep him going at all. 

If you’re not able to really grasp something within yourself, you're lacking the very soil it takes to enable the seeds others may throw into your direction to grow. Genuine connection is a peer-to-peer communication, attachment is a one-way road with you on the lower end of a hierarchy, however high the pedestal that others might have placed you upon may seem; the very fact that you have been raised and may feel degraded if you’re not held up by others puts you into the mindset of emotional infancy. 

Not being able to keep track of your own merits all of the time though is a legitimate part of being human — so having a fellow human reminding you of them is truly a gift. But just like a gift, it’s not something you’re inherently entitled to, but rather a bonus. 

The aspect that really touched me about this email was the very possibility of a connection through time and space thanks to the Internet. Something I had thrown into the web years ago had reached another human being so far away, just at the right moment at the right place. I’ve never been to Dublin, but from what he described — sitting in a cafe on a rainy day in a city which looks, assuming from Google Images, as if it’s Leipzig’s irish half-brother — was exactly the mood I had cultivated during the time I took the picture he mentioned. He saw what my eyes had urged to capture when I was in a similar place, and something I had felt and put into that picture triggered him to feel something strong enough to dive into it, not just swipe to the next picture, and not just write "That’s nice". 

In the age of A.I. evolving so rapidly that it’s already able to write somewhat entertaining and meaningful posts, at least to a degree that people are willing to throw their money at bots, and also beginning to learn the maths of photography — rediscovering and cultivating our abilities to share emotional connections with others through our contents is more important than ever. We can’t rely exclusively on the "sapiens" part, our ability to discern, to do the left-brained maths, in "Homo sapiens" any longer. Having reached an age in which we have successfully imposed the fruits of the collective mindset — the good and the bad – upon the planet, we should re-evaluate the other aspects of what it means to be human.  

To be able to do this, we have to break the still prevalent taboo of genuinely communicating our emotions, but also the one of even exploring them. Although my lovely messenger did the latter already quite well, he also had to add "I hope you don’t mind" — indicating the barrier many fear to overstep by sharing what they feel, even if it’s positive. Being vague and just commenting "nice" or clicking on "like" is way easier. 

Can we just all appreciate the wonderful possibilities of the Internet for a moment? Spreading positivity should be so much easier today and go viral big time, yet the things that do go viral tend to be ridicule and hate. This wouldn’t happen that much if we’d stop keeping our emotions in the basement most of the time, only setting them free when we feel ourselves to be "on the safe side" by thinking we understand an idea better than someone else, like concepts of appropriateness, morality, technical know-how, every "I know this better than you do therefore you are inferior"-mentality you can imagine looping this emotional imbalance.  

We can’t evolve overnight, but every day has its opportunities to discover and apply the merit of being kind to each other and genuinely look at what we feel. If someone’s work touches your soul, never be afraid to reach out to communicate it — just like you wouldn’t shy away from upvoting great content on Steemit.