A Thank You to the People Who Still Believe in Kindness

If you’ve turned on the news lately, or even just scrolled for five minutes, you already know why we’re writing this.

Things feel heavy right now. Depression rates are climbing. Around 280 million people worldwide are currently living with depression, and depression remains a major contributor to the roughly 720,000 suicide deaths recorded globally each year. Numbers like that are easy to scroll past, but they’re not abstract, they’re neighbors, coworkers, people in our own comment sections.

And most days, it’s easy to walk around believing that people just don’t show up for each other anymore.

That’s exactly why we started The Kindness Report six months ago, and why we’re not stopping anytime soon.

We wanted a space that didn’t ask anyone to pretend the world isn’t hard right now. It clearly is. But somewhere between the headlines, people are still doing quietly remarkable things for total strangers. A postal worker driving 52 miles to return a lost wallet. A stranger inviting someone into their tent at a festival because he looked like he needed a place to belong. A woman finding, decades later, the boy whose life she once changed. None of it makes the news. All of it is real.

This week, someone reminded us why that matters more than we even realized.

Victoria Ponders, a fellow writer, counselor, and one of the kindest voices we know online, wrote the most heartfelt piece about The Kindness Report hitting its six-month mark. She talked about tearing up at nearly every story, about needing “a regular dose of goodness” delivered to her inbox, especially now. Reading it, we were reminded that this isn’t just a series to us. It’s genuinely someone’s small reason to keep believing people are good, in a week where that’s not always easy to believe.

So today isn’t really about us. It’s about saying thank you to Vicki for seeing what we’re trying to do and giving it a place in her own corner of the internet, and it’s about asking you to go read her words for yourself.

Read Vicki’s post here →

And if today has been a hard one, hang on. Good things are still happening. Somewhere, right now, someone is being kind to a stranger for no reason at all. We’ll keep looking for those stories, every week, for as long as it takes.

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I would also like to share this song – ‘Good Things Happen All the Time ‘– because I think this song should be the perfect theme for our kindness report too. I’m leaving you here with the lyrics in the hope that this will make your day a little better.

Some days the good things aren’t easy to find
But if you’re looking you’ll see plenty around
It’s in the background and out in plain sight
Good things happen all the time

More than often people will be kind
Be good hearted and help each other out
Good news won’t often make the headlines
But good things happen all the time
Good things happen all the time

Ooh, ooh
Good things happen all the time
All the time

Clashes and conflicts get all the hype
But I think most of us get along just fine
Trouble may be in the spot light
But good things happen all the time

There’s a couple shadows but plenty more lights
Some doing wrong, but so many doing right
Behind the clouds is a sun ready to shine
Good days happen all the time
Good things happen all the time

Ooh, ooh
Good things happen all the time
All the time
Good things do happen
All the time

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Thank you for joining in today. I’ll see you on Saturday with another Kindness Report from somewhere around the world.