"What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly."
Setup
Commencement address at Syracuse University, 2013, by novelist George Saunders — Man Booker winner (Lincoln in the Bardo), short-story master, and one of the most morally serious American writers working. The speech went viral when the New York Times republished it as Congratulations, by the Way. Transcript via James Clear and Ladders.
The conceit: of all the things an old writer could regret — poverty, terrible jobs, skinny-dipping below 300 pooping monkeys (yes, really) — the things that still bother him, forty-two years later, are the moments he was mildly unkind to a shy seventh-grade girl named ELLEN.
Pull quotes
"What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly."
The thesis. Note the adjectives: sensibly, reservedly, mildly — the vocabulary of the competent, the respectable, the uninvolved. That's the indictment.
"Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we're central to the universe ... (2) we're separate from the universe ... and (3) we're permanent (death is real, o.k., sure — for you, but not for me). Now, we don't really believe these things — intellectually we know better — but we believe them viscerally, and live by them."
Saunders's compressed anthropology of selfishness. Three "confusions" we can't reason our way out of, only slowly outgrow.
"There's a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there's also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life."
The medical metaphor is the whole move: selfishness is a condition, not a character flaw. Which means it has treatments, not verdicts.
"'Succeeding,' whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that 'succeeding' will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended."
The treadmill warning. The mountain grows as you climb.
"As you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. … The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was 'mostly Love, now.'"
The best line in the speech. Mostly Love, now.
"That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare's, bright as Gandhi's, bright as Mother Teresa's. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly."
The benediction.
"Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now."
The end-of-speech charge.
What's doing the work
Three moves worth noticing:
- The inversion. A commencement speech is supposed to celebrate accomplishment. Saunders spends it saying accomplishment is unreliable — the thing to optimize for is the rate at which your self diminishes and love fills the space.
- The diagnosis is biological, not moral. Selfishness is "somehow Darwinian" — a default setting, not a sin. That reframe matters, because it makes kindness a practice you get better at, not a virtue you either have or don't.
- The regret mechanism. Saunders doesn't regret big swings or embarrassments. He regrets the mild moments when he responded sensibly to suffering. That's a useful diagnostic: whenever you catch yourself being "reasonable" toward someone who is hurting, notice. That's the regret you'll remember in 40 years.
Threads
- The Ceramic Cup Was Never Meant for Me — Sinek's cup story is the same message from another direction: the thing you're being handed is never yours; respond to the person, not to the role. Saunders names what "responding to the person" actually requires: kindness that would look slightly foolish.
- Untitled — the palliative-care parallel. The dying don't regret the achievements they missed; they regret the kindnesses they withheld. Saunders, working from the living side, arrives at the same ledger.
- The Inner Ring — C.S. Lewis at King's College (1944) — Lewis diagnoses the longing-to-be-inside that produces the mild response Saunders regrets. If you're inside the ring, you can't afford to be visibly kind to the person outside it.
Source
Transcript: jamesclear.com/great-speeches/failures-of-kindness-by-george-saunders. Also available as Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness (Random House, 2014). Delivered at Syracuse University, 2013.