S2:E21: Kindness revisited

Thursday, February 4, 2021

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S2E21 // Kindness Revisited

2.18.21

Episode Title: Kindness Revisited

Episode description: Sometimes it's the little things that go a long way.

Show notes: You can learn more about Nicholas Eply’s work here and watch his excellent videos on the surprising power of social connections here.

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This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland California to Hamilton Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

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“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

“Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”

“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”

“I’ve been searching for ways to heal myself, and I’ve found that kindness is the best way.”

“Kindness. It’s such a small thing, but it can make a huge difference.”

Those statements came from the Jewish theologian and rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the American author Henry James, the Dalai Lama, and Lady Gaga, respectively.

This past week I revisited one of our earliest episodes from season 1, the Surprising Power of Kindness. Even though a lot has changed since then, some of the ideas that helped me most in those early days of the pandemic are helping me still. So today, I want to revisit that episode, with a few additions and updates.

We’ve called season 2 Pandemic Odyssey because for months, throughout all of these episodes, my family and I have been in search of home. That voyage has taken us from California to Massachusetts, and it’s prompted us to question almost all of our pre-pandemic assumptions about life. You can hear that story from the beginning starting with the season 2 prologue, but you’re also welcome to jump around.

Today, as we revisit an early episode of Shelter in Place, we’re also revisiting an early book of Homer’s Odyssey. It’s a sort of mini-Odyssey that leads us into the larger story. Prompted by the goddess Athena, Odysseus’s son Telemechus sets out on a journey around Southern Greece to get news about his father, who’s been gone for ten years.

Even in that mini-Odyssey, Telemechus changes a lot. He learns more about his father. He gains the courage he needs to face the future. He grows up.

Those changes result in part because of the kindness of strangers--first Athena, and then a couple of kings who were friends of Odysseus before he disappeared. They offer hospitality, tell Telemachus what he needs to know, and give him the support he needs to continue on his journey.

One of those kind hosts is King Menelaus, who has spent a lot of time worrying over Odysseus by the time Telemechus shows up in Sparta. King Menelaus welcomes Telemechaus into his home even before he realizes who Telemechus is. Menelaus says that others have often shown him kindness when he’s traveled, and so he wants to pass that kindness on.

It’s also a wonderful moment in the story. When he arrives, Telemechaus has a hunch that Menelaus might be able to help him--and he does--but the interaction also ends up being a great source of joy for Menelaus, who takes comfort in connecting with his dear friend’s son.

As we’ve journeyed through our own pandemic Odyssey, we’ve changed a lot. You might even say that we’ve grown up. Often, it’s been the kindness of others that has given us courage to face the future and the resources to keep going.

In season 1, episode 19, I shared some surprising research about kindness and how it was playing out in my own life. That research has made a big difference over the months, and so today I want to you back to that episode. It’s early April, my family and I are still in our home in Oakland, California, and the pandemic has only just begun.

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For the past couple of weeks, someone has been walking around my neighborhood writing messages of hope and encouragement on the sidewalk. I love my neighborhood, and I devoted a whole episode to the story of how we became a community--that’s episode 9 if you missed it. Case in point, there is currently a window treasure hunt going on, where kids can walk around and spot items people have put up in their windows. So far 55 households are participating. One neighbor even made a map of it.

The sidewalk messages came to my attention when my neighbor Judy sent an email to our neighborhood listserv. Judy and her husband are retirees who live across the street from us, and it’s not unusual for us to see her out walking her dog Ruby or chatting with a neighbor. My kids’ affection for Judy rivals the love they feel for their grandmas. They’ve put on shows in her front yard, baked her cookies, and love yelling out, “hi, Judy,” whenever they see her across the street. She gives them birthday cards. She’s a writer herself, and the author of several books. Judy had written our neighborhood to say thank you to whoever was writing those encouraging messages. She said they’d cheered her every day when she was out walking Ruby, who lately she’d taken to pushing in a stroller since after 18 years Ruby’s age was starting to catch up with her.

Judy’s message reminded me of Nicholas Epley on the science behind meaningful interactions. Nick is a social psychologist and professor at Chicago Booth School of Business. He studies social cognition—how thinking people think about other thinking people—to understand why smart people so routinely misunderstand each other. He teaches an ethics and happiness course to MBA students called "Designing a Good Life."

A couple of years ago, my brother took Nick’s class, and he’s still talking about it. After attending one of Nick’s webinars, I understand why.

He began by quoting Aristotle: “man is by nature a social animal.” Connecting with others is one of our deepest human needs, and the quality of our social connections is a powerful determinant of our health and wellbeing.

Nick’s research measures social satisfaction in relation to physical health, religion, and age. He’s looked at the satisfaction people get from increased income--the positive effect of which, interestingly, flattens out at about $75,000 a year.

What his work has shown again and again is that it turns out that being lonely is just as bad for your health as smoking.

It increases cortisol levels in your blood. It compromises your immune system and cardiovascular health. Nick said, “You don’t die of loneliness, you die of something else--but it is an underlying cause.”

Nick’s research doesn’t just look at the negative effects of loneliness. It looks at the positive effects of reaching out to others. We know intuitively that we feel better when we’re kind to others or when we express gratitude, and Nick’s research confirms this.

Nick says that when we reach out to others, it’s powerful. Even for introverts, merely acting more extroverted can make us feel better. But what fascinated me most about Nick’s research is that people also tend to wildy underestimate how positively their social acts will be received by others. When we’re faced with decisions about whether or not to say hello, reach out, express support, connect more intimately, perform acts of kindness, or ask for help, we create all kinds of psychological barriers for ourselves. Most of us are familiar with that dreaded moment on an airplane or bus when the person next to us starts talking when we’d rather bury ourselves in a good book. But Nick’s research reveals how even in these kinds of situations, our assumptions are often wrong.

Nick says that when people measure their predicted social satisfaction from connecting with both strangers and people they know against their actual experience, the lived experience of connecting with others is more positive, less awkward, and better received than they anticipated.

He ran an experiment on the train in Homewood, IL, where people were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: 1) keep to themselves and enjoy their solitude. 2) Do whatever they normally do. 3) Do something somewhat radical. Try to start a conversation and make a connection, learn something new about a stranger. His study showed that the highly social people had the most positive commute--more positive than those who kept to themselves. He did the same study in London and the results were identical. Nick says that there’s a gap--often a large one--between how people think they will feel when they connect, and how they actually feel.

People tend to think that others don’t want to talk to them, and so it will be difficult to start. But nearly everybody in the study was willing to respond. We underestimate how willing others are to engage with us.

In another experiment, people wrote letters expressing their gratitude to someone in their lives. The study measured both their own predicted and actual feelings of satisfaction and awkwardness. Over and over again the senders felt less awkward and more positive than they anticipated. But the response of the recipients of those letters was even more extreme. Compared to how the letter writers predicted, recipients consistently felt more pleasantly surprised both about receiving the letter and about its content, and felt less awkward about receiving them. The letter writing was good for those who wrote them, but it was great for those who received them. This was true whether or not the person was close or someone the letter writer had grown distant from.

Nick also said that the quality of conversation matters. His studies have shown that people predict that they’ll feel more awkward and less happy when they ask deeper questions in conversations, but in reality, people felt less awkward, happier, liked the experience, and felt a stronger bond when the content of the conversations was deeper. Nick mentioned a study by Art Aaron, which inspired the New York Times story “36 questions that will make anyone fall in love.”

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Over the course of eleven months, over 60 interviews, and 121 episodes, I have experienced this firsthand. Whether I’m talking to my childhood friend of more than thirty years or meeting someone for the first time, that experience of sharing our hopes, dreams, and concerns for our world has been a deeply rewarding one. It’s not only made me feel more connected to strangers and friends alike, but it’s helped me to feel more hopeful about what’s ahead.

Nick also said it matters how you connect.

Phone calls are less awkward, more intimate, and more satisfying than people expect them to be. We feel so much more connected when we hear another person’s voice than we do through seeing a text.

This one really hit home for me recently. A couple of weeks into the pandemic, my sister-in-law Alexis had a miscarriage. The week it happened, she called me to talk about it. I had a miscarriage myself a while back, when we were trying for number three, and I wasn’t prepared for the way it would level me. For me, the experience was akin to losing a child--it was losing a child. It didn’t matter that I already had two healthy kids. When that third baby died, I lost more than a fetus. That death was also the death of my hopes. I would never get to meet this person I longed to know. I wouldn’t get to watch them grow up, or see who they looked like, or how they would bond with their siblings, or how they would shift our family dynamic. I was in my late thirties at the time, so after nine months of trying and failing to have another baby, we gave up trying. Eventually we did have another kid, but all of these years later I still carry inside me the loss of that other baby. I haven’t had a year yet where I don’t think of her on the day she would have been born. It was the same week Alexis lost her baby.

I wasn’t going to share Alexis’s name but when I asked Alexis if I could mention her experience anonymously, she said she’d be glad to be mentioned by name. And then it hit home that this is exactly what Nick’s research has shown: we want people to know us, to reach out and connect with us in meaningful ways. And the way we connect does matter. Alexis said that she’s taken great solace from the voicemails she received from friends and family, from people who actually picked up the phone and let her hear their voice. Her sister sent her flowers. Her parents and that same sister sent letters. Alexis said that it was people taking the time to share in her sorrow and reach out in personal ways that meant the most to her.

This is a good reminder for me. I’ve been guilty of sending texts to friends experiencing loss instead of doing something more personal, like picking up the phone. My fear of the awkwardness of not knowing what to say has sometimes overruled my desire to connect.

Nick said that during this time of physical distance, we get the chance to be Santa Claus to others. He said if you want to feel better today, sit down and write a letter to someone who has done something really great for you. Send it. Get in the habit of sending someone a compliment or kind thought whenever you think of them. If there’s someone you haven’t thought about for a long time, give them a call. When you talk to others, ask them how they’re really doing.

Ask meaningful questions. These acts have extraordinary power. Take little steps. Get started, and then do it more often. It’ll mean more than you think.

After seeing Judy’s email and learning about Nick’s research, I went out and wrote my own messages of hope on the sidewalk. I felt a little silly, especially since my kids weren’t with me, but it also felt good. The next morning, it rained all day. All of the messages got washed away.

But then last night when I went out for an evening run, there was a freshly chalked smiley face in front of my house, and near it these words: “Nevertheless, we persisted.”

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It’s been ten months since I first encountered Nick’s research and wrote about it. Judy’s little dog Ruby died a few months ago. Some of our neighbors have sold their homes or moved away. We’ve moved away, too--at least for a little while. But we’ve persisted. So have our neighbors. When Judy’s dog died, our neighbors flooded her with messages of comfort. Our friends down the street welcomed a new baby just last month. That third baby of mine--the one I didn’t think I’d get to have--just turned four. And my sister-in-law Alexis is expecting a baby in May.

Through all of the ups and downs of this pandemic, it’s been the kindness of others that has kept us going. It was the dinners our friends delivered for months after Nate lost his job. The kind reviews on Apple Podcasts from all of you who have taken the time to let us know you’re listening. It’s the financial support of Shelter in Place listeners, who even in a pandemic have given something to help us continue this work. It’s the friends and family who welcomed us into their home as we made our way across the country. It’s the messages I’ve gotten from friends and family along the way that have given me the courage to keep going.

Telemechus had his Athena and the kings who could remind him of the long view of his family’s history. We need those people in our lives, too, to extend kindness and remind us that what we are going through now won’t last forever. This week Alexis sent me a text reminding me that it had taken her and her husband Matt 10 years to get to where they are now with Brick & Mortar and Delta Wines. She said that it’s like that anytime we’re building something new. It takes time and courage, and patience and hard work to see the fruition of a dream.

Early in the pandemic my friend Kirstin started leaving me messages using the voice memo app on her phone and then texting me the message. It began a conversation that has continued for nearly a year, and it’s one that I treasure. Our messages aren’t long, and sometimes we’ll go weeks or even months between them, but then one will pop up, and it’s always a delight, a tiny reminder that the friendship is still alive, that there are people who care. It’s prompted me to leave voice memo messages not just for Kirstin, but for other people in my life as well.

A few months ago Nate and I started making lists of all of the people we could think of who we were grateful for, both now and in the past. Some of them we’d lost touch with and others had been in our life all along. We started leaving voice memos on our phones and sending them by text.

I have to say that we haven’t always heard back from people. What’s been interesting is that even when we don’t hear back, there’s real joy in leaving the message, in telling someone else why I’m grateful for them. And then sometimes I do hear back, that the message made someone’s day. Sometimes it leads to more messages, to continued connections that have gone deeper in the pandemic than they did when we saw each other in person. In a couple of instances, it’s brought me back in touch with people I haven’t talked to in years.

I still miss our neighborhood and the friendships that made Oakland home. I miss physically being with people without having to take safety precautions or limit numbers. I long for the time when we can do that again.

But in the meantime I want to end this episode with an invitation: join me in reaching out to others. Record a voice memo and send it to a friend or family member. Tell them something you appreciate about them, or thank them for a kindness they’ve extended to you in the past.

You might not hear back from them--which is okay. You’re still putting some good out into the world, and chances are you’ll feel better. But also, you never know. Your message might just be the thing that makes their day.