The #BeKind hashtag is easy to circulate but deciding what kindness is can be complicated
After Caroline Flack’s death, the #BeKind hashtag was retweeted millions of times, its message transferring, in phrase anyway, from the internet to real life, appearing in bookshops and on cupcakes. One clothing brand raised £100,000 for the Samaritans by donating a single day’s profits from its “Be Kind” T-shirts. And so the idea of kindness rinsed the country like a cool wash – a reminder, a plea, a bellow from the kitchen.
I have been thinking a lot about kindness. A couple of years ago, as the concept started to be repeated more and more as a buzzword akin to mindfulness, with self-help books on the subject proliferating, and the TV and film industries announcing their intention to promote it with their programming, I investigated kindness for this magazine. The research took me back to the “happiness industry”, often criticised for displacing attention from the causes of unhappiness. The difference between happiness and kindness, I suggested, was that the former was passive, but the latter active. But since the rise of the hashtag, I’ve started to question this.
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