What I learned from a week of 'radical kindness'

The homeless man outside the supermarket rubs his hands together.

"Me nan used to use this," he says to me, grinning. He's applying lavender hand cream from a tube to the white skin of his hands.

"Mine too, actually," I tell him, and we laugh as we say our goodbyes.

I had been walking past the supermarket when I'd seen him, sitting out the front with a corrugated cardboard homeless sign. I had approached him then, because I am kind and also respectful, and had asked him if I could get him anything from inside the shop.

Except, that isn't exactly what happened. I had approached him because I was writing an article about me trying to find kind things and being respectful. I know! Kind of takes the shine off, doesn't it?

As a mate of mine said, "If you're being kind in order to write about how kind you were, haven't you fallen at the first hurdle?"

Which strikes at the heart of all the confusing questions I have been asking myself over the past week about what constitutes a truly kind act.

Does your intention matter? Does the size of the act of kindness matter? Does it matter if you get something out of it?

I put all this to ethicist Matt Beard, who told me that philosophers call the act of caring for another as a way of caring for yourself: "egoistic altruism."

Dr Beard describes this as "using the other person as a kind of 'reputation pump' — a receptacle for your own moral goodness".

In other words, I fell at the first hurdle. Hard.

The relationship between kindness and respect

All this soul searching has been inspired by the top uniting issue emerging from the Australia Talks National Survey: a belief that Australians need to show more respect to each other.

There's a perception that we each live in our own echo chamber, shouting our tailor-made opinions to ourselves over and over until we die. And it seems many of us would prefer to think this does not always have to be the case.

Originally, in response to the survey-topping result I was going to attempt to commit random acts of kindness, just to see what happened. The more I thought about it though, the more that seemed to bypass the "respect" element.

The hardest time to be kind is not when someone is helpless and you, an empowered person, walk up and are kind at them. It's when you personally couldn't even imagine being that other person.

They vote differently. They believe stupid and wrong things. They're bad drivers. They're terrible parents. They've made stupid mistakes. They're different.

Just after I finished high school, a friend's father died suddenly. A bunch of us were out that night and the friend didn't turn up. We joked about how hopeless he was. Typical him!

Privately, though, I didn't think it was like him at all and I felt a twinge of worry, but someone said they'd seen him earlier getting a kebab. A kebab! Ha! Typical! We found out the next day.

I have forgotten, 20-something years later, what my reason was for not going to my friend's father's funeral. The real reason, I now think, was that my friend seemed suddenly different, transformed in one terrible moment into someone defined by this huge experience with which I could not (and didn't want to) identify.

To better understand this act of unkindness on my part, I found an expert in why so many of us turn into complete weirdoes when somebody dies: Hunter Mulcare, oncology psychologist.

'The real measure of respect is demonstrating to a person that they matter'

I wanted to know if the answer to the question of why I was weirdly unkind to my friend is an extreme version of the answer to the question of why people are ever unkind: because they're not identifying with the person they're being unkind to.

Dr Mulcare was very nice to me about what a terrible a person I was. He explained that because humans don't like thinking about dying, we pretend to ourselves that it isn't going to happen.

When we suddenly have to think about it, that pretence is "punctured", which people tend to deal with in one of two ways: they approach, or they avoid.

That's why when someone close to you dies, good friends can disappear, but then the doorbell rings and it's someone you haven't seen since high school carrying a lasagne.

Approaching or avoiding are two oppositional ways of dealing with anxiety, according to Dr Mulcare. We can perhaps therefore presume that kindness comes not only from your intention, nor the impact of your act, but from the act of rising above that instinct to flee from difference.

There's something called the Ben Franklin effect, which posits that if you want somebody to be your friend, you should ask them to do you a favour.

Being good and kind makes us feel good. Maybe it even makes us feel powerful. Woah. Is kindness even real? Well, yes. You know it because you've received it.

You might have even said one of the things that demonstrates the real currency of kindness, "Oh, you shouldn't have!" or "You've gone out of your way!"

The real measure of kindness is making an effort to demonstrate to someone that they matter to you, sometimes inviting them into a collaborative kindness project called friendship. The real measure of respect is demonstrating to a person that they matter, full stop.

Kindness begets kindness

Over the past week, I attempted to override my own instincts to avoid.

First, I stopped to chat with a man in the street who was walking his ancient dog. I wouldn't have stopped, usually, because I always have things to do and because you never know how a stranger is going to turn out.

We had a very nice chat and he invited me to a street party at his neighbour's house next month. I told him that was very kind of him.

"Not kind," he said. "When you're my age, you have to make new friends. They keep dropping off."

I didn't reassure him that kindness is hardly ever entirely selfless. We just laughed, because we were approaching not avoiding, and went our separate ways.

A few days later, my neighbour lost her cat. She was desperate, tears springing to her eyes when she told me. She didn't sleep, roaming the streets calling the cat's name and walking to the local animal shelters during the day.

She told me she was getting posters made up and I offered to paste them up around the neighbourhood.

Well, let me tell you, I have never had more chats in the street than I did putting lost cat posters up.

I was gone for hours. I met the woman who lives behind us. I met a passing cyclist and his girlfriend. I met a woman who lost her cat once and it came back three months later. I got a LOT of advice about finding lost cats. I had a huge chat to a couple on the nature strip who invited me to the same party the guy with the dog had invited me to.

Making connections a key to kindness

I didn't buy the homeless man at the supermarket anything. I asked if I could. Twice. I even said I'd go in and get some cash.

"No, mate," he said to me.

"Seriously. People have been so good to me today. I don't want to take advantage."

We had a chat after that, then went our separate ways. I was off down the street when I heard him calling after me.

"Wait up," he called, and I turned around. He was holding out the lavender hand cream.

"Forgot to offer you some," he said to me, a bit puffed.

"Remind ya of ya nan."

He held my upturned hand in his own and squeezed some cream out onto it before running back to his stuff. If you want a friend, get them to do you a favour.

He kept turning back and grinning at me. Human connection is kindness. Kindness is a group project.

Lorin Clarke is a Melbourne writer, podcast producer and maker of RN's Fitzroy Diaries.

The Australia Talks National Survey asked 54,000 Australians about their lives and what keeps them up at night. Use our interactive tool to see the results and how their answers compare with yours — available in English, simplified Chinese, Arabic and Vietnamese.

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