By The Editorial Board

There was a time when being considerate wasn’t a performance, but simply how people lived. Holding a door, returning a smile and giving someone the benefit of the doubt were small rituals that stitched us together. They were gestures so ordinary they went unnoticed. But somewhere between self-help mantras and social media highlight reels, we decided that being decent was optional and that compassion was a tax on independence. Now the quiet creed of modern life has become “I don’t owe anyone anything.”

The rise of hyperindividualism didn’t happen overnight. It grew out of good intentions — the desire for autonomy, the pursuit of self-fulfillment, the promise of freedom from conformity. But like any virtue stretched too far, independence became distorted. When we began measuring worth by self-sufficiency, dependency turned into a dirty word.

Independence has made us lonely. A 2024 APA poll revealed that one in three Americans is lonely. So many of us are either victims of our own self-sufficiency or our loneliness is a product of others.

Community once tethered us to presence — to the shared rhythm of our neighbors, classmates and families. But now, community has been rebranded as competition. Instead of asking how we can help each other thrive, we ask how we can prove we don’t need anyone. It’s a shift that’s left us lonelier, more defensive and less capable of small kindnesses that require vulnerability. All the signals we’re paying attention to someone other than ourselves are relatively gone.

The “I don’t owe anyone anything” mindset sounds empowering, until it isn’t. On the surface, it’s a call for boundaries and for protecting one’s peace. And, yes, boundaries are healthy. But somewhere along the way, they’ve been confused with indifference. We’ve mistaken kindness for weakness and consideration for submission. It’s as if being polite now means you’ve been duped by a system that doesn’t value your time.

But basic decency is not a debt. You don’t hold the door because you owe someone; you do it because it makes the world a little less sharp. You let someone merge on the highway not because you’re a pushover, but because it keeps chaos at bay. Courtesy is not currency — it’s community.

In 2021, the BBC conducted a survey called “The Kindness Test.” They found that the two most common reasons people choose not to be kind are that they fear it will be misinterpreted and they simply don’t have time.

Sure, it takes time to volunteer and give someone a ride to the airport, but holding open a door or smiling at someone is still kind, and only requires a few seconds of your day. We’re making excuses to be bad people when it’s so much easier to just be good people.

When we treat every interaction as a transaction, we erode the fabric that makes coexistence possible. Hyperindividualism teaches us to prioritize self-preservation over empathy, and the result is a culture allergic to accountability. If no one owes anyone anything, then no one feels responsible when things fall apart — not relationships, not neighborhoods, not institutions.

This mindset seeps into everything: the way we drive, the way we post online, the way we talk to service workers. The person who refuses to hold the elevator isn’t necessarily cruel; they’re just exhausted from a culture that tells them life is a zero-sum game. We’ve been told so many times to “look out for number one” that we forget how to look out at all.

The antidote isn’t abandoning individuality; it’s redefining it. Independence should mean knowing who you are, not forgetting that others exist. We can still protect our peace without barricading ourselves behind it. We can still say no when needed, but we can also say yes when kindness costs us nothing.

To move forward, we have to remember that humanity was never meant to be a solo act. The small, unspoken courtesies of daily life — holding the door, saying hello, sharing space — are not relics of a simpler past. They’re the bare minimum of what it means to live together.

So, no, you don’t owe anyone your time, your energy or your emotional labor. But you do owe the world your basic decency. Because when everyone’s too busy proving they can survive alone, we all end up standing in locked rooms, thinking the title of “most self-sufficient” is how you win life.