alt Hacker NewsHow will the miracle happen today?
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Before I quit riding my motorcycle, I recalled one important thing: all the way from the Oakland Hills to downtown San Francisco, many (I dare say 'most') drivers would step their cars to the edges of their lanes to make room for me to lane-split. I know there are lots of people who use their phones will driving, but this was clearly intentional, and a large number of people would do it. I was riding a Ducati but in a modern car you won't hear me. So that means that this large number of people were:
* checking their mirrors
* deciding to make room for me
You don't have to make room for me. I can lane split with a car in the center of its lane and I can slow and stop if its close to this side. But people would do it. It's just an everyday kindness - a small measure of friendly consideration and I appreciated that.
I see others expressing this point, but I'll add my two cents: this essay really bothered me.
1. The writer describes hitchhiking to work every day, presumably for months or years. He doesn't describe in any way how he paid back that kindness, either to the people he rode with directly, or just by paying it forward.
2. The writer describes traveling in Asia for 8 years, and many of the instances of kindness he describe imply very strongly that he intentionally put himself at risk, where others were faced with the choice to help him or let him suffer consequences. It's one thing to get caught in a rip current and need assistance; it's another entirely to swim out past where you are safe, and then wait for someone to rescue you -- and to do that repeatedly for eight years. Further, it is obvious from the language used that he was traveling rough by choice, with the privilege and economic security of his background, and yet repeatedly accepting -- I would argue demanding -- the help of people from a poorer background than himself. He was cosplaying poverty and repeatedly being assisted by people living it for real.
3. The backyard idea seems similarly pushy. He says he was never turned away, not once. So he believes that no one, given an actual free choice, would rather not have a stranger camp in their backyard. He ignores the possibility that people would feel uncomfortable about rejecting someone presenting as having no place to stay, and rather believes that everyone he asked woke up that day thinking about how happy they'd be to do a favor for a stranger. And he couches the whole process as him doing them a favor.
4. He lists multiple instances where people less well-off than him went to great lengths to help him, without ever thinking about why they might feel obligated, and through it all admitting that not only doesn't he engage in such kindness himself, he can't imagine that he would.
5. And through it all he characterizes what he very nearly describes as him pushing himself on people as "willingness to be helped" -- as some sort of saintliness.
And of course each of these people only saw him once, for a short while. Reading this essay we see how it is a pattern: how he is essentially a traveling con man, moving from mark to mark, letting each of them believe that he just happens to need help this one time, so they put good out into the universe. But in reality he is taking, taking, taking, abusing the world's willingness to help -- if everyone did what he did, the world would swiftly become a meaner, poorer place.
This reminds me of a video I watch recently of a comfortably off guy who decided to try and do a long-distance cycle with just £100.
He could afford not to rely on others, but instead he let people buy him food, give him a bed, etc.
This didn't sit well with me. If you can pay your own way, but choose to instead let others pay for you, you're just sponging off people.
I'm from Sri Lanka. One incident I always remember is how the front wheels of my car went into a ditch and got completely stuck while trying to pull out of a shopfront parking lot. I was fairly new to driving and was at a complete loss as to what to do next. Within seconds, a crowd of men gathered, some from the bus stop nearby, others from the restaurant in front of the parking spot. "Get back in and reverse when we tell you", said one person. Then a group of about 5 men literally lifted the front of my car and placed the wheels back on terra firma. I reversed out of the ditch, parked the car and got out to thank them, but they had dispersed as rapidly as they had assembled. I always thought my people a bit brusque in social interactions -- we don't greet shopkeepers or supermarket cashiers; we don't smile randomly at each other; we don't often say thank you. But I suppose when it matters, people are more willing to get involved and roll up their sleeves to help.
Really nice article, but it sort of flies in the face of all our biological imperatives.
Being a good "kindee" means forgoing security, control and some safety.
Constant Gratitude for just the miracle of life means forgoing the driving dissatisfaction that will push you ahead.
This is the classic battle between our ancient biological impulses and the reality of modern society. Many religions try to square these: Buddhisms central focus is to "stop grasping" your desires, Christianity wants you to "surrender" and put your faith in god. And then you also have articles like this that have a vague spiritual bent but mostly preach mindfulness and gratitude as a balm to our general dissatisfaction. Do we still need constant anxiety around our safety, do we still need to feel dissatisfied with each achievement and constantly want more? Or were those just useful imperatives for an animal 50,000 years ago but useless to us today?
In my personal life I have momentary success being mindful/grateful, but the bare reality is we are the product of millions of years of life being a short cruel struggle, fraught with danger. Does modern society give us the right to throw all that away and pretend we get to float around observing the beauty of the world? Or is our life supposed to be a battle?
That was wonderful writing. As we go through the daily grind of life, we forget how privileged we are to be alive.
I found the following two paragraphs truly incredible.
> All of us begin in the same place. Whether sinner or saint, we are not owed our life. Our existence is an unnecessary extravagance, a wild gesture, an unearned gift. Not just at birth. The eternal surprise is being funneled to us daily, hourly, minute by minute, every second. As you read these words, you are rinsed with the gift of time. Yet, we are terrible recipients. We are no good at being helpless, humble, or indebted. Being needy is not celebrated on day-time TV shows, or in self-help books. We make lousy kindees.
> I’ve slowly changed my mind about spiritual faith. I once thought it was chiefly about believing in an unseen reality; that it had a lot in common with hope. But after many years of examining the lives of the people whose spiritual character I most respect, I’ve come to see that their faith rests on gratitude, rather than hope. The beings I admire exude a sense of knowing they are indebted, of resting upon a state thankfulness. They recognize they are at the receiving end of an ongoing lucky ticket called being alive. When the truly faithful worry, it’s not about doubt (which they have); it’s about how they might not maximize the tremendous gift given them. How they might be ungrateful by squandering their ride. The faithful I admire are not certain about much except this: that this state of being embodied, inflated with life, brimming with possibilities, is so over-the-top unlikely, so extravagant, so unconditional, so far out beyond physical entropy, that is it indistinguishable from love. And most amazing of all, like my hitchhiking rides, this love gift is an extravagant gesture you can count on. This is the meta-miracle: that the miracle of gifts is so dependable. No matter how bad the weather, soiled the past, broken the heart, hellish the war – all that is behind the universe is conspiring to help you – if you will let it.
What's interesting about this post is that it would be completely unsurprising to most people in most parts of the world, as well as most people here 100 years ago. The discomfort so many people in this thread feel with receiving kindness and the devaluing of the gift of companionship, gratitude, and a good story is a testament to how far off human norms our society is these days.
I struggle with this a lot myself - I've had to overcome deep feelings of inadequacy and insecurity because I never valued what I offered people just by being present and because I always felt like I had to "square the books" - that every interaction or relationship was an exchange that needed to square its ledgers. The best thing for my mental health has been to become comfortable just being with people and accepting their continued presence and return to my company as something that doesn't require an exchange - that human companionship and kindness are things we enjoy as people, not services to be itemized and accounted for.
One interesting note on this is that it's not just an "old world" phenomenon - if you look at many old farmhouses across the midwest, they've got a separate covered section that's accessible from outside the house - the assumption was that travelers passing by could and would spend the night there, and often the owners would have supplies of oatcakes or other durable foodstuffs for travelers, because everyone who traveled needed somewhere to stay or something to eat at some point, and reciprocity could be assumed when the homeowner traveled themselves in the future.
Radical openness can slide into naïveté if it ignores power, incentives, and bad actors. “Be vulnerable and good things will happen” is only true in constrained contexts, where norms, reciprocity, and consequences exist. Outside those, vulnerability can absolutely be exploited.
Ina perfect world openness is not surrender; humility is not passivity; trust is not indiscriminate access.
For those in the thread worrying that KK may have been mooching off people, and would not reciprocate: many years ago, I opened up our back yard for people who wanted to come to O'Reilly's Emerging Tech conference, but could not afford the sky-high hotel prices in Silicon Valley (this was before AirBnB or couchsurfing).
I was surprised when Kevin Kelly appeared. He'd been my (very distant) boss at Wired, was a published author of one of my favorite books, a very well-known figure and a smiling but disarmingly calm manner. He sat and amicably talked for hours with a yard full of people, many of whom have become some of my closet friends. Then, as the evening closed, he asked if he could sleep in my yard too. Others had brought tents, and burning men structures, and it had begun to rain. Kevin pulled out a camping sleeping bag from nowhere, struck out, and I saw him later, in the soaking, muddy garden, quietly curled up under someone's geodesic dome structure.
Decades later, after Covid, I mailed him out of the blue, and asked him for advice. He immediately remembered me, invited me to his home, and talked to me, again, for an hour or so, about AI, optimism, and how to change the world.
To be frank, I never emailed him thank you, and I still feel guilty about that, but now I feel like it was never needed or asked for. I may mail him anyway. Maybe there's a miracle or two still left in the day.
I did the hitchhiking thing in my 20's. Up to Alaska and back. I know what he describes.
I wish everyone could have some experience like this. Because, like Kevin, I also have a positive view about strangers, about my fellow humans. And I have met a lot of people (friends, coworkers) where I recognize in them a fearfulness of the world. And I used to be like that too.
It really is a different and a wonderful world I think when you lose your fear of it.
Stories like this always feel a little bittersweet. It’s beautiful, but women would be in potential danger in situations like these.
And I say that as someone who has spent years the world traveling alone and isn’t afraid of humanity and agrees that the kindness of people is one of the most precious and Hope-building things in the world.
This is a mindset that is intentionally cultivated in Jesuit novices to the priesthood in what they call the "pilgrimage experiment": each is given $50 and a bus ticket in order to make a trip to a specific/meaningful destination while giving and receiving aid in whatever opportunities arise. Example anecdote: https://www.jesuitscentralsouthern.org/stories/judge-for-you...
More so about this thread than the post, but I think it's a shame that so many immediately go to the edge cases of safety concerns (parricularly for women) or strangers with difficult mental illnesses. I don't want to belittle or dismiss those concerns, as they do exist, but letting that limit potential possibilities feels like a unnecessarily limited life.
Granted I'm lucky enough that in my travels and general life nothing awful has happened to me but opening yourself to your fellow peers on this tiny planet is such a core part of existence that we should find ways of making this happen. It doesn't need to be picking up hitchhikers, they're millions of relatively risk free interactions out there. Dive in.
I've been lucky enough to have a couple big adventures in my life, including living in China for a while as a teenager and later hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (from Mexico to Canada). This has been exactly my experience.
On the PCT, in Mount Shasta while my friends and I were waiting to be seated at Black Bear Diner, an older gentleman came up and asked us about the hike. After talking for five minutes he told us he wanted to buy us breakfast and handed me a 100 dollar bill. I have dozens of such stories -- it was always easy to find a hitch into and out of town and often I would be offered a room to stay in. It's hard to describe but when you're an a quest, big or small, people just really want to help. Over the course of the trail I came to agree with the author: these people were doing me a kindness, yes, but I was also paying with experience, stories, levity.
I agree with the other commenters that one can't always be a kindee. Next time you're driving up the west coast and see a dirty hike with a dirty pack, pick them up :^)
> one might even call the act of accepting generosity a type of compassion. The compassion of being kinded.
When reading this, I can suddenly relate. There's a colleage who always smiles but I know she's hurt inside. Sometimes in a quiet moment I try to comfort her with careful listening, kind words and genuine advice. She's very receptive and thankful to this act of kindness and I find it a pleasure to be kind to her. The reward is so high that it almost feels compassionate towards me.
Just want to say I love this vintage internet blog style.
I kind of struggled reading this, gratitude for the kindness offered to the author was genuinely good reading, but I also had the overwhelming feeling of, I don't know the bane of the emotion, but.. taking advantage of their kindness felt rude.
I know that there was an exchange, the author's company in return for the accommodation, and that may be true, just, I don't know, it was hard to reconcile.
FTR I personally am the same generation as the author, and also silent time hitchhiking, and "paying it forward" by proving rides and accommodation to others.
I think the ending is worth reading to; to me this was not an essay showcasing a travel philosophy of reliance on others, but rather to express an easy to dismiss notion that you are not alone, and there are people that can and will look out for you.
I'm trying to square this guy's experience with all of the homeless people who don't seem nearly so lucky. Or perhaps they are being helped and supported and I don't see it?
I agree with others here that the notion of relying on others so completely makes me feel uncomfortable, like I'm a burden. But I think that's part of what the author intends to draw attention to. Wouldn't a world where everyone freely supports each other, even if it's not needed, be a more pleasant place, and a safer place, than one where everyone looks out for themselves? Is a community where each member is only kind to other members who can reciprocate really kind, or just cooperative? Each act of kindness was given freely, and I assume the more extravagant examples were unasked. When you give something to others, you gain something yourself. As long as he's not misrepresenting his situation (e.g. claiming to be a victim or refugee) I don't think he's really doing something wrong - just something that goes against highly competitive big-city western values, which neither he nor the givers seem to share.
Loved this piece. Kindness and gratitude as a kind of symmetry. I have to work on both of those, I'm afraid. I suppose we all do: but, they seem admirable goals.
Okay, I will take the contrarian position. As I read this I kept waiting for the part where he somehow repays all the hospitality he has received, if not directly to those who gave it, then forward, somehow. Instead, all I got was new-agey rationalization.
To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a certain state of openness. If you are lost or ill, this is easy, but most days you are neither, so embracing extreme generosity takes some preparation. I learned from hitchhiking to think of this as an exchange. During the moment the stranger offers his or her goodness, the person being aided can reciprocate with degrees of humility, dependency, gratitude, surprise, trust, delight, relief, and amusement to the stranger. It takes some practice to enable this exchange when you don’t feel desperate. Ironically, you are less inclined to be ready for the gift when you are feeling whole, full, complete, and independent!
The things he lists are not reciprocation. The paragraph strikes me as a long-winded way of saying, "It takes a special mindset to beg from others when you're not actually needy." Indeed it does.
One might even call the art of accepting generosity a type of compassion. The compassion of being kinded.
Not only does he rationalize a life of asking for and taking from others, even the very poor, without any material reciprocation, but even admits that he is not sure he would have done the same for another person in his position.
When the miracle flows, it flows both ways.
No. The attitude of humility and gratitude with which one is obliged to receive another's charity is not itself a repayment. The social contract around this kind of hospitality is that everyone gives and receives materially; if you are taking now because you have nothing to give, then the expectation is that you will give to someone else later, not simply walk the earth taking and taking. It's a prisoner's dilemma, and we only all benefit if we all cooperate. Calling a person who takes but never gives back in a material way a "kindee" is just sanctifying the defector.
(EDIT: please note that I'm not advocating against offering hospitality, only against taking it with an attitude that you will neither repay it nor pay it forward, because just the act of accepting it is somehow holy.)
Does anyone else feel a sort of anxiety in those situations? I've been on such trips and I would rather not sleep at all than ask a stranger for help. When I'm in a position to help, I am delighted to do so, but also scared of offering.
How does one get over that fear?
Beautiful story. One Christmas Eve I ( with my kids in the car) picked up a hitchiker. His name was Christian, and he was headed to our church. I went out of my way, and dropped him off in the parking lot. I felt blessed to have helped him.
I feel like there's something in the zeitgeist happening. I've only become aware recently of the 'gift economy' but I'm seeing more and more people post things related.
I think the lesson to take from this is "Who's miracle can I be today?"
In summary, a wealthy westerner travels the world, asking the poor for favors. He eventually comes to believe that enlightened spirituality rests primarily on gratitude. (One can't imagine why.)
He then proceeds to passive-aggressively browbeat readers who aren't as grateful as he is for the "lucky ticket called being alive."
Has it occurred to him that perhaps it was his ticket that was lucky? It certainly seems luckier than that of the Filipino family who opened their "last can of tinned meat" to feed him, a volitional vagabond.
If there's anything worth reading here, it's the reminder that altruism is more prevalent than individualists sometimes expect. The rest is frankly stomach-turning.
"Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you."
Worst advice I have ever heard.
> I am not sure I would invite a casual tourist I met to take over my apartment, and cook for him, as many have done for me.
leaves a bad taste. I've helped and been helped in all kinds of situations. The sense of entitlement in this guy and the way he proudly explains how he is using people is just awful. Help is to give when you know that the gesture will have an disproportional effect for the other person and will make the world a better place. The way he presents it, he just relies on other people because he can and without giving ever back. Maybe I'm misreading, but I don't feel inspired.
It seems some commenters feel the author was taking advantage of all those people who helped them. I disagree.
I think they are missing a large part of the situation through lack of experience, a selfish focus, or some other different perspective I don't understand. I very much doubt that any of the people who helped him along his travels thought he was in dire straights and needed the resources more than they did (which might be fraud if he had lots of resources and refused to use them in favour of lying to others to take their resources). I don't think someone who picks up a hitch hiker does so because they think the other person will die if they don't so it's worth the driver being taken advantage of.
I would be willing to share resources if someone knocked on my door and asked to camp in my backyar; for pretty much nothing but the expectation of mutual respect between myself, them, and the rest of society. Though I would also offer a meal for the chance to hear about what they were doing and why. No part of that situation involves me thinking they Need my backyard or Need to be fed to live. In fact, I would do it thinking they left a job and a normal life and chose the journey they're on; my assumption would be that when they were finished they would move back to a more regular life. Where I would have a problem is if the person seemed clearly intent on living like that their whole life; taking without giving. So in a way, my expectation is that the person is giving back in the experiences and stories they share with others, in the knowledge and experience they take back into a regular life; I will happily contribute to that. I don't think this changes regardless of how much someone has so I don't think it matters if someone from Canada travels Africa for example. I don't see any reason to believe he was lying to people to make them feel sorry for him.
Another aspect is that often he was indirectly selecting for people who were willing to share resources. By hitch hiking one is excluding anyone who feels they and society get no value from this person. One is excluding anyone who feels they would be taken advantage of by helping a hitch hiker. Those kinds of people just don't stop the car. Therefore anyone who helped him was obviously willing to do so and felt they would benefit more than what they expended to help.
Beautiful and disturbing.
So many people around the world are so wonderfully generous with everything, and we should celebrate that.
However mooching off others is weird.
It is a fine thing to graciously accept generosity. And it is a fine thing to graciously offer generosity without expectations.
It gets difficult when the generous are poor if they choose to give. It can be hard to decline without being offensive.
I have lived for lengths of time basically at the generosity of others (not poor, including the dole in my wealthy country) so I shouldn't fault the guy. However, I have also tried to give back, and now I'm older I also try and pay it forward. Certainly I've given >10x back to the government (I'm taxed highly in my country - and I dislike thinking about taxation as something you ever get back).
His story is a simplification of the modern world. We are often given so much by our society and it can be difficult to give fairly back to society.
Yet for some reason his writing recalls me of You can't win by Jack Black https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404
We went back to the fire and discussed breakfast. "Nothing but Java," said the bum that had the coffee.
"I'll go to the farmhouse," I volunteered, "and buy something."
"Nix, nix," said one; "buy nothin'," said the other, "it's you kind of cats that Cut her off. Tell her you're ashamed to be settin' there wasting time and the other boys starvin' under the bridge."
Before I got to the house a couple of dogs dashed out, barking savagely. A healthy, matronly woman came out and quieted them, looking at me inquiringly. I told her myself and two boy friends, runaways from home, were hungry and I wanted some food, that I would be glad to pay her for anything she could spare, and if she would wrap it up I would hurry down to the bridge with it, where my chums were waiting.
"Yes," she said kindly, "come in. I haven't much here, but maybe I can find enough." She gave me a seat outside near the kitchen door, where I waited and made friends with the dogs. In no time she came out with a large parcel, and refused the money I offered. I thanked her and went down to the bridge with my "lump."
The bums had coffee boiling. We found enough tin cans to drink from and opened the parcel. It contained cold, fried chicken, cold biscuits, and half a pie.
"You're a good connecter, kid; sure you didn't pay for this?" one of them said.white man experience
If the world was filled with people with KK's attitude, humanity would have died off a very long time ago.
> We are at the receiving end of a huge gift simply by being alive.
I always perceived it completely opposite. Even as a few years old child.
Care doesn’t scale
Harm scales trivially
And it’s not a question of “not everything needs to scale”
If there’s anything that needs to scale its care and there are thermodynamic limits to that because singular individuals need magnitudes more care than any specific individual can provide
For example I had to go to the emergency room last night and the number of people who were involved in my care was at least 7 people
So let’s say you have millions of individuals with zero care and support networks who need more than a single individual can care for them
That means you need some multiple of individuals who have access energetic capacity to care for all of the individuals who do not have support or care structures for the ability to do it individually
The fact of the matter is of the 8 billion people who live on the planet, there does not exist another 16 billion people who are servicing them to make sure that they have the care that they need
But thermodynamics requires those 16 billion excess people to provide inputs to care for the 8 billion
Turchin describes this as elite overproduction theory. And I’m not saying it is correct and I’m certainly not saying it’s normative, but I do believe that there is a level of descriptiveness here that makes the mathematics of “care” impossible to solve with the atomic unit of human.
This world today is so cruel, no one cares for their own life or the life of others. I am mentally ill and homeless. Why? Why do all of you let this happen? Why does Kevin Kelly let this happen? He is am optimist only because he has not seen reality.
Passages like the following are telling someone like me, the man with nothing, to help or else I will get no help? Just accept that no one has helped me for six years even though I do help others? And worse yet, to help rich people like him?
"Receiving help on the road is a spiritual event triggered by a traveler who surrenders his or her fate to the eternal Good. It’s a move away from whether we will be helped, to how: how will the miracle unfold today? In what novel manner will Good reveal itself? Who will the universe send today to carry away my gift of trust and helplessness?"
That is just the same "power of positivity" wrapped up in new writing. Because no one here will rent me an apartment for 1/3 of my disability income. I have surrendered to my fate more than one. Maybe I did not do it right? Can you tell me how to do it right Mr. Kelly?
"We are at the receiving end of a huge gift simply by being alive." That is easy to say when you are Kevin Kelly who seems to still have the silver spoon in his mouth. Hey Kevin, why don't you help by being more like the Christian you say you are, sell all of your belongings and help the mentally ill like Christ tells you to do?
Until I see him do this, all his words are meaningless.
I know I am privileged to be alive, but that privileged is abused by the rich boomers like KK (I am in my late 50's).
What an amazing blog post. Such a treat to have read this. Thanks for sharing.
I guess I've been struggling incorrectly.
When I read these enjoyable posts, I agree, but then the thought creeps in that the human experience is not all that bliss. Thoughts about the Russian soldiers raping Ukrainians and putting the grenade booby traps into the children toys (replace with other war experiences of your choice), or about parts of our society idolizing insecure men being cruel and inevitable murder of innocent bystanders that happens then.
Of course the author had a great experience, he's a weird white American somewhere unexpected, the embodiment of a "traveler" archetype. Would that Swedish person give their car keys to a random Roma on their doorstep? Yeah no.
I don't know where I'm going with this rant. "Check your privilege" screeds are overused. Being kind, on the other hand, isn't.
99.9% of the people I meet want to be kind and help. You just need to "tune into that frequency." Fantastic anecdotal article that speaks to the goodness of humanity.
> Although we don’t deserve it, and have done nothing to merit it, we have been offered a glorious ride on this planet, if only we accept it.
This is the core message of Christianity. Undeserved Grace.
I will also say though, I find it annoying this guy so easily received gifts from those least able to afford them, and then admits he is not willing to be so generous himself. Did he learn nothing from their example?
Lots of interesting things in this miraculous story, but I can assure you none of these miracles would happen without the two words completely left out of the article: white privilege
I couldn't help but focus on the vicarious adventure aspect Kelly mentions which was the "payment" he offered drivers in exchange for the ride. This is a mechanism that has largely been deprecated by the modern attention economy.
In the era of hitchhiking, the bandwidth for novelty was low. A driver on a long commute had no podcasts, no Spotify or audiobooks. A stranger with a story was high value. The transaction was something like = I provide logistics and you provide content; like the story of your cross-country bike trip.
Today, we have near infinite content in our pockets. The marginal utility of a stranger's story has plummeted because the competition is Joe Rogan or an endless algorithmic feed. We have largely replaced the P2P protocol of kindness with a sort of centralized platform of service. We stripped out the human latency and the requirement for social reciprocity and replaced it with currency and star ratings. It makes me surreal to think about this.