The Kindness Report #10: He Listened to a Song on Repeat for 9 Days & The Internet Listened Back

There’s a version of the internet that most of us are pretty tired of. The one that runs on outrage and hot takes and people performing opinions at each other. The one that makes you feel vaguely worse about everything after ten minutes of scrolling.

And then, every once in a while, the same internet does something that genuinely stops you.

This is one of those times.

The Song, the Boy, and the Repeat Button

In late April, a 23-year-old Polish influencer who goes by Łatwogang sat down in Warsaw and pressed play on a song. Not a particularly famous song, not a global hit – a Polish rap track written by a rapper named Bedoes 2115, specifically about cancer. A diss track, of sorts. Not aimed at a person, but aimed directly at the disease itself.

The chorus is sung by an 11-year-old girl named Maja, who is experiencing her third cancer relapse. Her lines in the song are essentially a message to her cancer, telling it that she’s still here, still laughing in its face.

Łatwogang pressed play, and then he didn’t stop.

For nine days straight, he livestreamed himself listening to that song on repeat, and in between plays, he opened the stream to whoever wanted to show up.

What Happened When People Started Showing Up

He had set a fundraising target. The number he was hoping for, if everything went well, was somewhere around $1.3 million.

What he got was $67 million.

The momentum built gradually, then all at once, the way these things tend to. Polish athletes started appearing. Robert Lewandowski, widely considered the greatest Polish footballer of all time and currently playing for Barcelona, recorded a video of himself singing along to the track and announced a donation of roughly a quarter of a million dollars. His Barcelona teammate and Polish national squad compatriot Wojciech Szczęsny followed. Iga Świątek, the six-time Grand Slam champion and one of the most recognised athletes in the world, announced her support and donated two tickets to her upcoming Wimbledon match alongside a cash contribution.

A speed skater named Vladimir Semirunniy, who had just won silver for Poland at the Winter Olympics in Milan, donated his medal to the fundraiser. And then shaved his head in solidarity with Maja and the other children who had appeared on stream over those nine days.

And then Chris Martin called in and played a hastily prepared piano piece in Polish.

Just sit with that for a second.

The Part That Matters Most

By the time the nine days ended, the fundraiser had collected over 282 million złoty ($67 million), all of it going directly to a fund supporting childhood cancer patients and their families.

It didn’t just sit in an account waiting to be allocated. It got to work almost immediately. By the end of the fundraiser, around $2 million of it had already been spent — helping 84 children, financing therapy, buying medical equipment, and supporting families with bills that no family should have to face alone.

When it was all over, Łatwogang and Bedoes 2115 addressed the people who had watched, donated, and shared. They thanked everyone for what they had done for the kids, and for how they had, in their words, “moved the entire country.”

They also said something else that’s worth remembering. They said they hoped the fundraiser would help change the way people think about childhood cancer, not as something inevitable and devastating, but as something worth fighting, worth funding, and worth talking about loudly.

“We asked the media to publicize the fundraiser and the awareness that cancer is not a death sentence,” they said. “Because that is all we care about.”

The Larger Thing

There’s no grand insight to wrap this up with. The story does most of the work on its own.

A 23-year-old with a platform decided to use it for something. A girl named Maja, facing her third relapse, sang a defiant chorus into a microphone. Athletes who didn’t have to show up, showed up. A rock musician from Coldplay played piano in a language not his own. And millions of ordinary people, most of whom will never meet Maja or Łatwogang or any of the children involved, reached into their pockets and said: this matters, and so do you.

That’s the thing about kindness when it actually scales. It doesn’t look like a gesture anymore. It looks like a movement.

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Missed previous Kindness Reports? Read them here: The Kindness Report

Seen something kind around you? Tell us about it — we’d love to share it in a future Kindness Report.

Sources: Polish Influencer Raises $67 Million for Cancer Research During 9-day Livestream – Good News Network

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