I just scrolled on social media recently before I go to bed and I saw a lot of videos about kindness. It really touched my heart. I mean there’s a moment when you watch something and it just hits different, you know? Someone helping a stranger, a small gesture that nobody asked for, a random act of warmth in a world that often feels cold.

But I have to be honest. My first reaction was not pure admiration.

Somewhere in my head, I questioned it. Is this real? Or is this just content? Is that person actually kind, or are they just kind when the camera is on? I’ve seen too many videos where the whole point was the reaction, the clout, the comments saying “this made me cry.” So I became skeptical. I started thinking that maybe kindness on social media is mostly performance. A show. Something people do to feel good about themselves while others watch.

And I carried that assumption for a while.

But then I kept scrolling, and something shifted. Not because I saw more polished videos with dramatic background music. But because I started noticing the ones that weren’t trying hard. A shaky phone camera. No caption. Someone just doing something quietly good without waiting for applause. And the comments were not “I’m crying” but just… “thank you for this.”

That’s when I realized I was wrong.

Genuine kindness does exist. It just doesn’t always look the way I expected it to look. It doesn’t come with a spotlight. It doesn’t always go viral. Sometimes it’s small and unpolished and barely noticed. But it’s there. And the fact that some people perform kindness for attention doesn’t cancel out the ones who are just… genuinely good.

I think I let my cynicism get ahead of me. Which is easy to do when you’ve been online long enough to see how everything can be turned into a brand, an aesthetic, a strategy. You start to distrust things that look too good. You read into motives. You protect yourself by not believing.

But that’s a lonely way to live.

If I dismiss every act of kindness I see as fake, I don’t just protect myself from being fooled. I also close myself off from being moved. From being reminded that people can still be good to each other for no reason at all. And that reminder, even through a screen, even from a stranger, matters.

So yeah. I was wrong. Not about everything, but about this. Kindness is real. It exists even when no one is watching, and sometimes it finds its way to your phone screen at midnight and reminds you that the world is not entirely cold.

Maybe that’s enough for tonight.