Why the Right Thing Feels So Wrong
When basic decency becomes an extraordinary act
I watched a friend ask to meet for coffee because they needed clarity about a relationship crisis. "I really need your perspective on this," they said, setting a specific time and place. Then the day came—and nothing. No text, no call, no explanation.
I sat in that café for forty minutes, checking my phone, wondering if something terrible had happened. When I finally reached out, they replied hours later with a casual "Sorry, got busy with other stuff."
All it would have taken was thirty seconds and one honest message—"Can't make it today, let's reschedule." Instead, silence became the easier choice, leaving me to wrestle with worry while they avoided a mildly awkward conversation about changing plans.
This wasn't malicious. It wasn't calculated cruelty. It was something far more common and perhaps more troubling—the ordinary human inability to do the right thing when it requires even minimal discomfort.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Not the dramatic moral failures that make headlines, but the everyday erosion of basic decency that seems to be accelerating around us.
The friend who says they'll call you in an hour urgently and doesn't, offering no explanation until you ask after a month. The business that takes your money immediately but makes you chase them for weeks to resolve a simple issue. The person who borrows something and acts like you're being unreasonable when you eventually ask for it back.
These aren't complex ethical dilemmas requiring advanced degrees in philosophy. They're basic courtesy situations with obvious right answers. Yet somehow, doing the obvious right thing has become... extraordinary.
Dr. Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments revealed something disturbing about human nature—ordinary people will inflict harm when authority figures give them permission. But what's happening now might be worse—people avoiding basic kindness when no one is watching, when there's no authority figure, when the only thing required is simple consideration for another human being.
The psychology behind this is more complex than simple selfishness. Research by Dr. Francesca Gino at Harvard shows that people often avoid doing the right thing not because they don't know what's right, but because right action conflicts with other psychological needs—the need to see themselves as good people while avoiding effort, discomfort, or sacrifice.
We're masters of moral licensing—doing one small good thing so we can rationalize avoiding larger obligations. We tell ourselves stories about why this particular situation is different, why normal rules don't apply, why the other person will understand.
But here's what I've noticed—the right thing usually isn't complicated. It's just uncomfortable.
Returning a text message acknowledging you can't help instead of ignoring it. Explaining why you can't follow through on a commitment instead of hoping they'll forget. Saying "I don't know" instead of making something up. Admitting you made a mistake instead of letting someone else wonder what they did wrong.
None of these require heroism. They require about sixty seconds of mild discomfort.
Yet we treat these moments like impossible moral mountains to climb, when they're really just small hills we refuse to walk over because we might get our shoes dirty.
I used to think this was about people being "too nice." Psychology experts often warn that excessive kindness gets taken for granted, that people are attracted to uncertainty and mixed signals rather than clarity and consistency.
But I've come to believe this analysis misses something crucial. The problem isn't that kindness is unattractive—it's that consistent kindness reveals the inconsistency in others, and that makes people uncomfortable.
When you always do what you say you'll do, it highlights when others don't. When you communicate clearly and directly, it makes others' evasiveness more obvious. When you treat people with basic respect regardless of what you get back, it becomes harder for others to justify their conditional courtesy.
This creates a strange dynamic where doing the right thing consistently can make you seem naive, demanding, or somehow out of touch with "how things really work."
But what if how things really work is exactly the problem?
I've been practicing Stoicism for years, and it's given me an unusual level of calm about most life situations. Traffic, train delays, work stress, relationship and family drama—these things barely register anymore because I've learned to focus only on what I can control.
But this pattern of people avoiding basic decency? It shakes something fundamental in me. Not because I expect perfection, but because I can't understand why mediocrity has become so acceptable when excellence requires so little additional effort.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, "In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present—I am rising to the work of a human being." The work of a human being includes keeping your word, communicating clearly, and treating others with the consideration you'd want for yourself.
These aren't advanced spiritual practices. They're the baseline requirements for functioning in a society where people depend on each other.
Yet we've somehow created a culture where meeting these basic requirements makes you stand out as unusually reliable, where simple honesty is noteworthy, where following through on small commitments is remarkable.
The most troubling part isn't that people fail to do the right thing—it's that they seem surprised when anyone expects them to try.
I've watched people react with genuine confusion when called out for not keeping their word, as if the idea that their commitments matter to other people hadn't occurred to them. Not anger or defensiveness, but actual bewilderment that someone took their promises seriously.
This suggests something deeper than mere selfishness. It suggests a fundamental disconnection from the reality that our actions affect other people's lives in real, tangible ways.
When you don't show up without explanation, someone waits. When you don't respond to important messages, someone worries. When you make commitments you don't keep, someone reorganizes their life around your word.
The ripple effects of these small failures compound exponentially. Trust erodes. Communication becomes more guarded. People start building elaborate backup plans for every interaction because they can't count on others to do what they say they'll do.
We end up in a society where the default assumption is that people won't follow through, won't be honest, won't consider anyone's needs but their own. And then we wonder why everything feels so transactional, so exhausting, so lonely.
What I've learned from years of trying to understand this pattern is this—you can't control whether other people do the right thing, but you can control whether their choices change yours.
The temptation is to lower your standards, to start playing the same games, to protect yourself by becoming equally unreliable. "If they're not going to keep their word, why should I keep mine?"
But that's exactly how decent societies become indecent ones—one compromised standard at a time, one rationalized failure at a time, one person at a time deciding that everyone else's behavior justifies their own.
Instead, I've chosen to see every moment when someone fails to do the right thing as an opportunity to demonstrate what the alternative looks like.
Not to prove a point or shame anyone, but because the world needs people who keep their word even when others don't, who communicate clearly even when others won't, who maintain their standards even when maintaining them becomes inconvenient.
This isn't about being "too nice." It's about being reliably human in a world where basic humanity has somehow become optional.
When I do the right thing even when others don't deserve it—especially when they don't deserve it—I'm not doing it for them. I'm doing it because I refuse to let other people's choices determine who I become.
The right thing is still the right thing, whether one person does it or everyone does it or no one else does it. Its rightness doesn't depend on popular participation.
Every time you keep your word when keeping it is inconvenient, you're voting for the kind of world you want to live in. Every time you communicate clearly when evasion would be easier, you're modeling what functional relationships look like.
These small acts of consistency add up to something larger—a life where your actions align with your values regardless of what anyone else chooses to do.
And maybe, just maybe, someone notices that there's another way to move through the world. Maybe they remember what it feels like to trust someone completely. Maybe they decide to try keeping their own word for a change.
Or maybe they don't. But that's their choice, not yours.
The only choice you can make is whether to be the person who does the right thing, or the person who has excellent reasons why they can't.
In the end, those might be the only two types of people there are.
Have you noticed this pattern too? What's your theory about why basic decency has become so uncommon? Sometimes the most important conversations start with the questions that trouble us most.