When you think of the year 2020, what comes to your mind?
Maybe one-liners from Tiger King ring through your ears. Maybe visions of homemade bread dance through your head.
Though pleasant and relatively harmless, these common experiences served as coping mechanisms for a collective trauma that unfolded that year.
Covid-19 had been wreaking havoc across the globe. The disease spread like wildfire, causing life-threatening symptoms that overwhelmed hospitals and claimed many lives.
Hoping to slow the virus, most of the world went into lockdown.
People lost their jobs, businesses failed, and many of us found ourselves stuck at home in isolation.
Moved by all the suffering, a group of celebrities decided to do something about it.
“Imagine there’s no heaven,” Gal Gadot sang into the camera with a smile.
Thus began the infamous cover of John Lennon’s Imagine—a video pieced together with clips of Hollywood stars like Natalie Portman, Jimmy Fallon, and Kristen Wiig singing individual lyrics.
This act of kindness intended to spread good cheer didn’t land well. It was heavily criticized as being tone-deaf—sonically and socially.
A viewer on YouTube commented, “It feels more like a mockery. Singing a song about unity and utopia in their mansions, separated from everyone suffering, and no worries.”
Gal Gadot would later admit that while she had “pure intentions” the video was “in poor taste.”
Privileged people are not the only ones vulnerable to being out of touch. The anxiety of caring for ourselves and our families in an unsteady economic climate can narrow our perception. Burnout can shut us down emotionally. A desire for validation and belonging can lead to performative goodness over genuine kindness.
When we disconnect from the world around us, kindness becomes a performance instead of a meaningful act of care and connection.
The Empathy Gap
The introduction to this month’s theme made a distinction between niceness and genuine kindness. To sum it up neatly, niceness is often driven by appearance while kindness stems from a deep desire to truly help others.
Throughout this month, we’ve examined the importance of tuning into the needs of our children, partners, family members, and friends.
After all, it’s difficult to offer assistance effectively if we don’t have an understanding of their life experiences. The same can be said for the people in our community—physical and digital.
Since the early 2000s, we’ve had the ability to foster global communities—bonding over music, movies, art, and viral moments on social media.
Still, worldwide access isn’t necessarily equal to worldwide understanding.
For example, a longitudinal study published in 2010 indicated a sharp decrease in college students’ empathy around the time society crossed into the digital age.
One explanation for this may be that text-based communication limits our ability to pick up on non-verbal cues like facial expressions and body language. Visual feedback activates our brain’s mirror neurons—cells believed to help us imitate observed behaviors.
Have you ever found yourself cringing when you saw someone else get hurt? That was your mirror neurons firing—helping you understand and almost feel their pain along with them.
Empathetic responses like this get flattened behind the screens of our devices. The absence of tone, gestures, posture, and facial expressions makes social interactions less immersive. This gap in connection makes it harder to recognize the nuances of another person’s experiences.
When we don’t have a full understanding of someone else’s situation, it’s easy to overlook potential pitfalls.
For example, the celebrities in the Imagine video were so used to their affluent lifestyles, they couldn’t see the insult and irony of singing, “Imagine no possessions,” to people in the lower classes dealing with sudden unemployment and isolation in smaller homes.
True empathy moves us to help in meaningful ways. When we truly understand someone else’s experience, we can ask ourselves: if that were happening to me, how would I want others to respond?
In most cases, the answer is unlikely to be: burst into song—though it would be nice if the world could be healed that way.
We live in a world that keeps us busy and physically distant, but that doesn’t mean kindness rooted in empathy is impossible.
The Integrity Gap
Kindness that isn’t deeply rooted in empathy can easily become a performance that, at best, has negligible impact and, at worst, has disastrous consequences for both the performer and their intended audience.
The Imagine debacle is an example of the former, while the financial and public relations challenges currently plaguing the Target corporation are an example of the latter.
The mass retailer began publicly aligning itself with social justice causes heavily in the mid-2010s with marketing and policies signaling support of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color.
In 2023, the cracks in Target’s progressive image began to show. Their decision to prominently display Pride merchandise outraged conservatives, culminating in confrontations with employees and vandalism in stores throughout the United States.
Target responded to the backlash by removing items deemed too controversial and moving their Pride Month displays to the back of certain stores—citing safety concerns for their employees.
The corporation found itself under scrutiny again in January 2025 when it ended a program that promoted Black-owned businesses and offered career assistance to Black employees. The initiative had been established after the high-profile death of George Floyd in 2020, and its rollback was viewed as a broken commitment to the Black community.
To be clear, genuine kindness doesn’t discriminate. Everyone deserves dignity and respect regardless of race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The problem is when corporations and individuals pay mere lip service to this ideal.
Target’s pattern of using surface-level allyship for good PR is called moral grandstanding, and this phenomenon isn’t limited to corporations.
Regular people from all sides of the socio-political spectrum can be found online parroting the ideas and slogans widely accepted by their preferred crowd with little to no introspection or behavioral change.
For example, the phrases “eat the rich” and “no ethical billionaires” have become popular sentiments in comment sections as wage stagnation and exorbitant costs of food, housing, and health care highlight vast wealth disparity on a global scale.
Yet, a number of these commenters spend thousands of dollars on concert tickets, purchase multiple variants of the same album, and harass people for criticizing their favorite celebrity.
Their words communicate class solidarity, while their actions reveal it to be conditional—if not mere performance.
Similarly, kindness that stems from moral grandstanding is often abandoned the moment the helper experiences discomfort or is asked to give up something of personal value for their cause.
Acts of kindness rooted in both empathy and integrity aren’t dictated by what’s popular or safe, and they don’t require an audience to be meaningful. They’re driven by love, compassion, and respect for others—values that aren’t easily shaken when things get tough.
Closing the Gap
The most impactful acts of kindness won’t always garner recognition, but they can strengthen our sense of connectedness—especially when they come from a place of empathy.
Seeing things from someone else’s perspective often requires us to tap into our own experiences and emotions to understand theirs.
For example, it’s easier to be patient and kind with someone who makes an honest mistake if we remember that we are also imperfect. We know what it’s like to mess up and worry about how others will react.
In those moments, most of us would prefer to be met with grace—not hostility.
Kindness rooted in empathy means remaining calm and respectful even when a cashier isn’t as efficient as they could be or a restaurant employee gets our order wrong.
It’s choosing to assume a stranger’s bad moment is a one-off—possibly driven by anxiety, depression, trauma, or a difficult season—instead of viewing them as a villain making a cameo in your story.
These quiet acts of kindness have an impact beyond the receiver since the way we treat one person can impact the way they treat others.
The employee who is berated for their inefficiency or error might carry that stress with them for the rest of the day—leaving them with less emotional bandwidth to tend to their family with kindness and care.
A disruptive or rude person rarely de-escalates when met with the same energy. Confrontation is more likely to trigger or fuel a fight-or-flight response that can affect other people who come in contact with the individual.
Compassion, dignity, and respect, however, can have a stabilizing effect. It can be a refreshment for people used to being mistreated for minor mistakes and a mirror for those who may not even be aware of their rudeness or how disproportionate their behavior is to the situation.
It might even help someone regain an inner sense of peace, so they have the emotional bandwidth to have healthier interactions with other people they encounter in the day.
Admittedly, choosing a kind and empathetic response in difficult or inconvenient situations isn’t always our default response—especially when our own nervous system goes into high alert.
Those moments are when integrity matters most. If we want kindness to be an integral part of our personality, we need to regularly seek out opportunities to practice it with intention.
Acts of kindness don’t need to be grand to be meaningful. A small gesture like holding the door open can make a person feel seen and respected. A smile is often returned in kind and can send mood boosting signals to the brain. A sincere compliment might be just the thing someone needs to move through their day with confidence.
These actions have an even greater impact when the recipient pays it forward—creating a ripple effect.
When we practice kindness with empathy and integrity, we leave people better than we found them. It accomplishes far more than any slogan or symbol because it requires us to show instead of tell. It soothes and connects people without creating controversy.
Next Steps for Your Self-Discovery Journey
If you’d like to explore these ideas more personally, these resources may help.
Subscribe to receive your free Kindness Readiness Toolkit, designed to help you explore this month’s theme at your own pace.
Gentle Ways to Apply This:
- Examine where assumptions replace understanding in your digital interactions. This free printable, The Empathy Gap, includes honest self-assessment prompts and a perspective check exercise.
- Reflect on your express values and how they show up in your daily behavior. Use this free gentle worksheet, The Integrity Gap, to help you check for gaps between your intentions and actions.
- Set an intention to practice empathetic kindness this week. This free Closing the Gap printable helps you move from awareness into action.
Filling the Gaps
The Imagine video debacle and Target’s current PR struggles are cautionary tales of what can go wrong when an act of kindness has gaps in empathy and integrity.
We can’t provide meaningful support to others if we don’t actually understand what they’re going through. Sometimes this means opening up a conversation.
Imagine—no pun intended—if instead of bursting into song those celebrities had posted, “I’ve been watching the news and struggling with isolation myself. How are things going for you guys? Feel free to share in the comments.”
This could’ve created a powerful moment of connection and drawn attention to critical issues impacting ordinary people like mental health, domestic violence, and job insecurity. That information would’ve also helped philanthropic celebrities tailor their charitable acts to the actual needs of their audience—and avoid the embarrassment of being tone deaf in every sense of the phrase.
We also run the risk of being inconsistent in our kindness if we lend our support to others for the sake of maintaining appearances instead of a genuine desire to help.
Imagine if instead of grandstanding Target had chosen to either remain neutral in their marketing or stand their ground.
Marginalized groups wouldn’t have been left with feelings of abandonment and betrayal, and Target’s corporate executives wouldn’t have faced the difficult choice between capitulating to bullies or upholding their policies related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The moral of both stories is: kindness with gaps in empathy and integrity can easily become empty performances that end in controversy if we don’t fill them.
When we take the time to observe people and ask questions, we build connections between our inner world and the world beyond that can motivate us to choose kindness at all times—even when it isn’t easy.
If this post resonates with you, please share it with anyone who could use a reminder that one quiet act of kindness has the power to ripple outward to the world at large.
Have you ever experienced an act of kindness that missed the mark or caused more harm than good?
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. If you’d like to receive an email notification when the next post goes live, you can subscribe using the form below. Next week we’ll begin exploring the connection between patience and mental wellness.
Keep it kind, respectful, and focused on self-love and growth—let’s make this a safe, uplifting space. 🌿