I don't think this is naive. I want to say that up front, because the moment you say something like this out loud, the assumption is usually that you haven't looked closely enough at the evidence. I have looked. I have spent a meaningful amount of time in the last several years in close, unfiltered contact with people going through real hardship, which is generally considered the kind of exposure that cures naivety rather than sustains it.
It has done the opposite for me.
What I expected, going in, was to find people worn down by circumstance into something harder and more guarded than they otherwise would have been. I found some of that. I will not pretend otherwise. But far more often I found something I did not expect: people who had very little still actively looking for ways to be generous with what little they had. People who had been let down repeatedly still extending trust to a stranger handing them a bottle of water. Humor, in places I would have expected only exhaustion. Warmth offered to me, specifically, with no plausible motive beyond the fact that warmth was simply how this person related to another human being standing in front of them.
I think there is a tendency to believe that hardship reveals what people really are underneath — strips away the comfortable performance and shows the raw material. If that's true, then what I have actually witnessed, over and over, is that the raw material is frequently better than the performance. People under real pressure have shown me more unguarded decency than I typically encounter in rooms full of people who have nothing to complain about.
I do not think this means suffering is good for people, or that hardship builds character in some tidy moral sense. I am not interested in romanticizing difficulty. I think it means something more specific: that the instinct toward kindness runs deeper in most people than their circumstances, and that it tends to survive conditions that would seem, on paper, sufficient to extinguish it.
That is why I believe in humanity, as a practical matter and not a sentimental one. Not because people are uniformly good — they are not, and I have seen the exceptions too. But because the baseline, even under real pressure, even with very little to spare, keeps turning out to be better than I was prepared for. I have stopped being surprised by it. I have started expecting it. So far, more often than not, I have been right to.
From the archive
The Kindness We Never Hear About