What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?

I think the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for me was holding a door open or something similarly mundane. I don't have any other really nice or profound memories. Then again I have not gotten into any similarly bad accident as the OP (knock on wood)

I was in a car accident once, many years ago... nothing terrible but I was in shock (it was my first car accident) and in mild pain (bruises from the airbag and a headacke mostly). The other party came over and asked me if I had a phone. I was still in my car, trying to realize what happened. When I said that yes, I have a phone he said "then better call the police. the accident was your fault" (which for all I know was probably true), then he left to sit on the roadside and smoke a cigarette and scroll on his smartphone until the police and ambulance arrived, 15 minutes later. Because of him, they came with 4 or 5 extra vehicles, simply because I couldn't really answer their questions well ("how many people are in the other car? is anyone injuered besides you? are the cars still driveable or do they need to be towed?" all quesions I couldn't answer)

I overheard that he got a lecture from one of the cops later on, but still it was an experience that I don't want to make again anytime soon

Giving me a simple bottle of water when I was in need

My wife and I plus our (then) two small children were driving though France from the UK. I was towing a caravan and suddenly realised that the van had got a flat tyre. No worries, I thought, I have a spare, a jack and a wheel wrench. So, I pulled over and got to work changing the tyre. To my horror, I immediately discovered that my car’s wheel nuts were bigger than the van’s, so my car wheel wrench was useless for the flat van tyre! And all I had otherwise were small hand tools.

I should add that this was back in the days of dumb phones, long before GPS devices were common in cars, so all I had was a small-scale paper route map of France. I had no clue which way to go to find help, and no way to find a phone number. It was late afternoon, and we were still a long way from the campsite. I was starting to sweat.

But then a French woman with her daughter pulled over in a small car and asked if we needed any help. Using a mixture of my poor French and sign language, I indicated I needed a wheel wrench, which she pulled out of her boot. My joy and relief were obvious. I change the van wheel in no time, thanked her profusely, and off she went.

But there was twist in the tale: my hazard lights had been flashing so long that when I tried to start up the car, all I got was that sickening tick-tick-tick sound of a dead battery. Could my day get any worse? But then I remembered that my van had its own battery! A quick battery swap-over later, and we were back on the road, and had a great holiday, all thanks to the kindness of a big-hearted French woman who was kind enough to stop and offer help to foreign strangers stuck in the middle of nowhere.

A concussion despite a helmet. Surely that foam and plastic saved a life.

I can't really think of anything unfortunately, except courtesy stuff like holding a door. People don't really interact with strangers where I live.

Reading all the other comments really puts a smile to my face (as cliche as that sounds).

When I was about 3 years old, a man in a car tried to abduct me right in my front yard by offering me candy to lure me closer. An old woman we did not know witnessed this from down the street, recognized what was off about the situation, and rushed over yelling, scaring off the man. Not sure if I would be here today if not for her. My parents never were able to find out who she was.

It’s cool that this isn’t an Ask HN post yet there are still so many personal gems of stories in this thread. Good on ya, lads.

My rc drone lost signal and flew out of range several miles away. Being from a small town, the person who found it eventually found out it was mine, and he returned it.

I'm wondering if altruism is in decline, in this selfish age of social media.

I sometimes even get the feeling that altruism is seen as a weakness these days.

In general, I've found that people, even strangers, kind of look out for you. I've only had occasion to need this in America, but every time strangers have helped. What I found fascinating was that even late in the night, on a dark highway, a young woman would stop to assist. What a safe society.

Two of those occasions are when I crashed on my skateboard, and when I crashed my car. Both times, a young woman stopped to help me[0]. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to say when people haven't been kind to me. A girl on a train gave me the book she finished reading. A homeless guy helped me push a car[2]. I left my car open once with everything inside and a passing woman closed it for me and left a note.

But also the society built here assists competently when individuals cannot. After a motorcycle accident in the city, the ambulance was there to pick me up apparently (I wouldn't know, I have amnesia) within minutes.

We've always stopped to help when we can and have many times (a few in SF here[2]) but it is gratifying that others are also like that. The other thing I like is that people don't mind asking for help. I was at the Safeway up in Diamond Heights, all in my motorcycle gear (which some can find intimidating) and this old lady asked for help with her car boot. Why on Earth would I know? But it turned out to be a quick fix and while I sorted the latch out, this other elderly couple talked to me about the husband's Ducati which he used to have.

In fact, I have come to think about this non-kin pro-sociality as being some sort of sociocultural superpower among the societies that can practice it. It seems to me that the most successful societies practised this. Even in the age of empire, it seems some societies were more capable of pro-social outcomes. British imperialism was a brutal thing in many places and especially earlier in its time, but compared to intra-tribal violence among indigenous peoples it seems almost civilized. The bare minimum rise to civilization seems to have been to replace terminal fatal violence with non-terminal subjugation (which seems to have been a hard thing to achieve). The Maori left only a hundred or so Moriori alive, and ate and killed the rest. By comparison, the British had the Maori in parliament.

Similarly, the father of the Charlie Kirk shooter encouraged him to give himself up: placing his kin at the mercy of his non-kin society. I think this kind of non-kin pro-sociality is where the magic is in a successful society. But producing that is hard. As an example, no matter how much a young woman would want to help a man waving her down on the side of the road, she should not do so in Somalia. American society (and many others) has solved, for the most part, the problem of stranger trust. That enables this kind of cooperation, which enables large-scale coordination, which helps a society prosper.

This reminds me of what A Splendid Exchange says about the Qu'ran having rules on commerce and law: thereby allowing the Islamic world to prosper because any Muslim of the time could meet another Muslim of the time and know they lived by the same law (enforced by God, one presumes). This allowed stranger-trust across the seas.

Overall, quite fascinating. These societal innovations are devices that last for some period of time and provide a massive boost to those societies. Certainly whatever Dutch system existed to enforce joint-stock capital, a secondary market, and derivatives allowed them to coordinate to be the power they were at the time[3]. I wonder what the next such device will be.

The default of humanity seems to be to cooperate[4], so the hard part here is finding the device that fights exploitation of pro-sociality.

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-08-14/Fearless_Ame...

1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Motorcycle_Accident

2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-20/Car_Breakdow...

3: Though the flip side is the zielverkopers - people who turned labor into a tradable commodity but using what is in practice debt bondage

4: In some sense, all living beings are formed from cooperation

Not sure if this qualifies as a "stranger", but a nurse at the UCLA Cancer Center in Santa Monica helped my family and I when my sister was on her last days, dying of cancer. It was a bunch of little things: she got us into a single-bed room; she cleared out a maintenance closet for the family to meet privately with doctors; she did some sort of meditation with my sister that helped calm her; she "translated" what the doctors were telling us; she told the other nurses (and the security staff) to leave us alone (visiting hours). Mostly, she was a human to us, not just someone doing their job. I'll never forget the horrible experience of watching my sister dying, but Nurse Suzanna made it so much better. She's an amazing person, and I'll be forever grateful to her.

BTW, here she is: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanne-travis-rn-ocn-reiki-cert...

I love the story. The road rash picture that shows up in the OpenGraph preview makes it awkward to share, lol

old guy gave all his money and energy to start a school to keep civilization from going bonkers. i never knew him and he never knew me but we still are related.

Another one just came to me, as I witnessed it yesterday on the train. A homeless man was walking down the train aisle, shaking a handful of coins and asking people for change in a long drawn out plead.

Everyone stared deeper into their phones until he went away, but when he came back a woman with a child handed him some change and he walked on without thanking her.

The kid asked "why did you give him money mummy?" and her response was simply "you see homeless, you give money" and that was the end of it. I just liked the implicit matter-of-fact decency in which she lived her life.

The first thing that comes to mind is one time when I was pretty drunk, in my late teens, hurt my legs trying a very ambitious(stupid) jump and then passed out at a bus stop. Woke up later, no phone battery, in the city about an hour away from home and nobody else I knew around.

Limped into a 24hr kiosk and asked to borrow their phone to call for a ride. Got a no. Tried explaining the situation, no sympathy.

A guy who happened to be in there saw that I was really not having a great time, came over and just hugged me and said it was gonna be alright and let me use his phone. No idea who you are, wouldn't recognize you if I ever met you again, but thanks for that.

Gave me CPR and saved my life.

Warn me antipsychotics cause diabetes

It is really interesting the very high percentage of comments are people who don't live in the US, or the story happened outside the US. I don't say this in a snarky "the US is full of assholes" way, just that's interesting and I'm not sure why that would be.

Sent me 260 dollars.

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]

a blowjob

Someone gave me the quarter I needed to unlock an Aldis Grocery Cart

2025 years ago a guy none of us have met in person agreed to pay for our wrongdoing by agreeing to be tortured and die a humiliating death.