It’s a common trope: a man pulls over on the highway shoulder to help a stranger change a flat tyre. He waves off the twenty dollars she tries to hand him, checks that the spare is on properly, and drives off before she finishes saying thank you. There’s no selfie with them both on social media, no Facebook post #goodsamaritan; the guy doesn’t make a big deal of it when he gets home other than maybe noting he’s a bit late because he helped someone with a tyre. I feel quiet kindness can be confused with modesty, but really it’s a different approach.
Psychologists have a term for behaviour like this; researcher Heidi Wayment calls it a “quiet ego,” a self-identity that doesn’t need constant validation to feel secure.
“The volume of the ego is turned down so that it might listen to others as well as the self in an effort to approach life more humanely and compassionately.”
Wayment distinguishes between two forms of ego. The first is the quiet one; it still has a good sense of self inside; the second is an ego where that self has been squashed into silence. It’s an important distinction because too many of us - including me - get it all wrong. There’s a stoicism many of us have been inculcated with that we should be doing things for others without needing anything in return. Not expecting parades and ticker tape when we do a good deed. The danger, though, is that it morphs from humility - the first form of ego - into the second, where our self disappears. We build a sense of self that is entirely about service to others and consider not considering ourselves a virtue.
We all know people like this. It’s the friend who is always happy to come and pick us up from the airport. Or the one who drops by our place and waters the plants while we are on holiday. Or the work colleague who takes an extra shift so often it just becomes normal and nobody questions why. Of course, so much of this is rooted in genuine kindness and care; we all want to be there for our friends. But the pitfall is that they become the person everyone assumes will pick up the slack without asking if they actually want to.
When I was younger, my ego absolutely needed praise for ‘doing a good job’; I’d be the one who made sure everyone knew I had ‘done good’. But over time I’ve gradually come to understand the difference between staying quiet about my actions, and being up front about my limits. I’ve often found it hard to resist saying ‘yes’, even when it’s logistically a problem.
I’ve made a version of this argument a couple of times before, from different angles, firstly in The Cost of Being the Dependable One:
“They assume you are fine because you appear to be fine.”
And in The High Cost of Being Easygoing:
“There is a point at which flexibility stops being a virtue and becomes a disappearing act.”
The challenge is that quiet kindness, hyper-dependability, and permanent easygoingness can all show up the same way to the people around us. It’s invisible to them, and it may be invisible to us as well. It’s not really about them; it’s whether we can say no to an act of kindness - or whether we just do it anyway despite the personal cost.
Brené Brown wrote that about hard conversations:
“Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”
Expressing a boundary by saying no can be uncomfortable; we worry about the other person’s reaction, don’t want to lose face, or don’t want to be devalued in their eyes. But unchecked, it almost becomes a compulsion. Yet by saying no - we’re busy, we’re tired, we can’t get out of work early enough - but not allowing it to sink into a sea of apology, is simply being honest. And definitely more honest than someone who just says ‘yes’ to everything and confuses it with generosity.
Unlike my younger self, you don’t need to announce your endless good deeds to prove yourself to the world. But we all need to learn that our offers of kindness come at a cost, and that sometimes we need to say ‘no, not today’ and preserve the balance between the two forms of ego. This ensures we don’t sink into silence and instead just be quietly kind.
DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR
That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.