Newsletter · Values and relationships
The Quiet Disappearance Of Small Virtues
It has been a long time since I last wrote here. The summer break gave me something I hadn’t had in months: space to watch, to listen, and to think. And something has been sitting heavy on my mind ever since.
It began with a door. At a café one afternoon, an elderly man was struggling with a heavy glass door, a walking stick in one hand and a paper bag in the other. Four or five people stood nearby. Every one of them looked up from their phones, registered the moment, and looked back down. Eventually, a teenager held the door open.
The old man thanked him twice, as if he hadn’t expected it at all. That was what stayed with me. Not that people didn’t help, but that he no longer expected them to.
We Have Become A Culture Of “It’s Okay”
Somewhere along the way, we quietly lowered the bar. Lying is okay, if it’s convenient. Snapping at someone over something trivial is okay, if we’ve had a long day. Walking away from people is okay, if they’ve become inconvenient.
Values rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. They erode the way a riverbank does: grain by grain, so slowly that no one notices, until one day the house is standing at the edge of the water. I am not writing this as a judge. I am writing as someone who has noticed the water rising.
Courtesy Was Never About Weakness
Chivalry has become an awkward word. In a world rightly working towards equality, holding a door or offering a seat can be misread as implying someone is less capable. But I believe courtesy was never a statement about who is weaker. It is a statement about who we choose to be.
A man holding a door for a woman, a woman giving her seat to an elderly man, a young person carrying a stranger’s suitcase up the stairs: none of these diminish anyone. They are small acts of grace, and grace belongs to everyone.
The same goes for respect for our elders. It has slowly become optional, something we give only when it’s earned on our terms. Yet the people who came before us carried burdens we will never fully see. Respect is not a reward for agreeing with us. It is a recognition of the road they walked.
The Block Button And The Vanishing Art Of Repair
A client told me this summer about a friendship of nearly twenty years that ended over a single misunderstood message. No phone call, no conversation, no chance to explain. Just a block. Two decades of birthdays, hospital visits and late-night talks, erased faster than it takes to boil a kettle.
This is the pattern I see everywhere now. A relationship can go well for years, and then one small crack appears, and people instantly become enemies. Tolerance is close to zero. Forgiveness has become scarce.
In Japan there is an ancient art called kintsugi: broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with gold, so the cracks become the most beautiful part of the bowl. The philosophy is simple. The break is part of the object’s story, not the end of it.
We used to treat relationships a little more like that. Now we treat them like disposable cups. And the family table has moved to the comment section. Grievances that were once meant to be raised in person, questioned gently, argued over dinner and then resolved, are now posted publicly and dissected by strangers. Something private and fragile becomes content. And content, unlike conversation, rarely heals anything.
Love, Measured Against A Filter
Perhaps what worries me most is how the younger generation is learning to define love. A young woman I spoke with ended a relationship with a kind, steady partner because, in her words, it “didn’t feel like what I see online.” There was no betrayal, no cruelty. The relationship simply didn’t match a highlight reel.
Real love was never a highlight reel. It is the unedited footage: the arguments, the hospital waiting rooms, the years when the money was tight and the patience was tighter. It is two imperfect people choosing to learn, tolerate and grow together.
An older client of mine, married for over three decades, put it beautifully: “We never found each other perfect. We just decided to keep choosing each other.”
My fear is that if we measure love by artificial standards, many young people may never experience its deepest form: the selfless kind that gives without first asking, what’s in it for me?
“Are You Free?” Versus “Would I Miss This For Anything?”
Think about the last birthday party you were invited to. Did you go because you were free, or because that person mattered and you wanted to be there on their big day? More and more, our decisions pass through a quiet filter of convenience. We don’t do things because we want to or because they are right. We do them if they fit, if they pay off, if they cost us little.
The irony is painful. Life has never been more convenient. We have more access, more options and more comfort than any generation before us. Yet the simple virtues of loyalty, patience, forgiveness and showing up have become relics.
And we are paying for it. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory describing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, warning that social disconnection carries serious health risks. Meanwhile, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed people’s lives since 1938, keeps arriving at the same conclusion: the quality of our relationships is one of the strongest predictors of a long and happy life. Not wealth. Not status. Not how shiny or how fast we look.
We are winning the race and losing the reason we were running.
An Invitation, Not A Lament
I don’t share these thoughts to make anyone feel guilty. I share them because I believe the small virtues are not gone. They are simply waiting to be chosen again.
So here is a small invitation for this week. Before you block, call. Before you post, talk. Go to the party because you care, not because you’re free. Hold the door, even when no one expects it. Especially when no one expects it.
Character, after all, is not built in grand gestures. It is built in doorways.
Which small virtue do you miss the most?
If a relationship at work or at home needs repair rather than a block button, let’s talk.