Robin Williams said this line, or some version of it, in various interviews and public moments before his death in 2014. The line has, since, become one of those quotes that floats around the internet attached to images of Williams in various of his most beloved roles, usually presented as a piece of inspirational kindness-advocacy that the wider register absorbs without quite registering what it is being asked to do.
The line is, on close examination, doing more interesting work than the standard inspirational framing allows for. The line is not, primarily, an exhortation to be nice. The line is, more accurately, a structural observation about a particular asymmetry in how adult social life is conducted, paired with a practical recommendation about what to do about the asymmetry once one has noticed it. The asymmetry is real. The recommendation is harder to act on than the standard framing tends to credit.
The fact that Williams himself was, in some real way, a particularly credible source for the observation has not been lost on the wider register. Williams was, by every available account, someone whose own visible presentation in public life was considerably more cheerful than the interior weather he was carrying privately. His suicide in 2014 made this fact unavoidable in a way that, until then, the wider audience had been able to keep at a comfortable distance. The line, accordingly, has been received in the years since with a particular kind of awareness that the person who said it was, in some structural sense, also describing himself.
What the asymmetry actually is
It is worth being precise about the asymmetry Williams was pointing at, because the wider register has not, on the available evidence, given particularly good language to it.
The asymmetry is this. The interior life of any given adult is, by structural design, only partially available to that adult themselves. The interior life of other adults is, in most cases, almost entirely unavailable to anyone except themselves. The wider world sees only the surface presentation. The surface presentation has been calibrated, over decades of practice, to produce a particular kind of social functionality that does not, in any straightforward way, correspond to what the person is actually carrying interiorly.
The asymmetry is the gap between the surface and the interior. The gap is real. The gap is, on close examination, considerably larger than the wider register tends to credit. Most adults are, by long practice, displaying a surface that has been calibrated to allow them to function in the wider environment. The functioning requires the surface to look more or less stable, more or less competent, more or less untroubled by the various interior difficulties the person is currently navigating. The surface is what the wider environment sees. The interior is, in most cases, structurally invisible.
The implication of this is that any given adult one encounters in ordinary social life is, with non-trivial probability, currently navigating something interiorly that the encounter is not going to reveal. The something might be grief, illness, financial fear, marital trouble, the slow accumulation of various losses, the various small humiliations that adult life produces with depressing regularity. The surface gives no signal that any of this is occurring. The surface is structurally calibrated to give no signal. The person across from you is, in some real way, fighting a battle you know nothing about.
What the line is actually asking
The line is asking, given this asymmetry, that one calibrate one’s behavior toward other adults to the structural fact rather than to the surface presentation. The surface presentation suggests that the other adult is doing fine and can be engaged with on the assumption that no special consideration is required. The structural fact suggests that the other adult may not, in fact, be doing fine, and that the encounter one is currently having with them is occurring inside a wider context that one has no access to.
The recommendation, accordingly, is to default toward kindness, not because the other adult has visibly earned it, but because the structural facts of the situation make it the appropriate default. The kindness is not a reward for the other adult having visibly demonstrated that they need it. The kindness is, more accurately, a structural acknowledgment that one does not, in any given encounter, have enough information to know whether the other adult needs it or not, and that the cost of being kind to someone who did not need the kindness is considerably lower than the cost of being unkind to someone who did.
This is, on close examination, a calculation rather than a sentiment. The calculation is that, given the structural asymmetry between surface and interior, the expected value of defaulting to kindness is higher than the expected value of defaulting to whatever the alternative would be. The expected value is calculated across the considerable number of adults one encounters in any given week whose interior weather is not visible to oneself. The math is the math. The recommendation follows from the math.
Why this is harder to act on than it sounds
The honest acknowledgment is that the recommendation, while structurally sound, is considerably harder to act on than the standard inspirational framing tends to imply. The reasons are worth examining.
The first reason is that the structural fact about the asymmetry is, in most adult life, kept comfortably out of working memory. The wider environment is calibrated to operating as if the surface presentation were a reliable guide to the interior weather. The calibration is what allows the wider environment to function with the level of efficiency it currently does. The remembering of the asymmetry, in the middle of any given encounter, requires the active retrieval of a piece of information that the default operating system has been actively keeping suppressed.
The second reason is that defaulting to kindness, in the actual flow of adult social life, often runs counter to the various smaller incentives the situation is producing. The person being unkind is, in most cases, being unkind for reasons that, in the moment, feel justified to them. They are tired. They are in a hurry. The other person has, in some small way, inconvenienced them. The local situation is producing a particular kind of low-grade irritation that the unkindness is calibrated to express. The remembering that the other person may be fighting a battle one knows nothing about requires the overriding of the local incentive in favor of the global structural fact. The overriding is small. The overriding is, also, on close examination, considerably harder to perform reliably than the small size of any single instance would suggest.
The third reason is that the recommendation, taken seriously across an adult life, is genuinely costly. Defaulting to kindness, every time, regardless of what the local situation seems to be calling for, requires the person to give up the various small satisfactions of expressing the irritation that the local situations are producing. The satisfactions are real. The giving-up of them is, in some real way, what the recommendation is asking for. The wider register tends not to acknowledge the cost. The cost is, accordingly, often underestimated by the people who attempt to act on the recommendation, who then find themselves unable to sustain the practice and conclude that the recommendation was unworkable, when the more accurate conclusion is that they did not adequately budget for the cost.
Why Williams himself was the credible source
I want to acknowledge what makes Williams himself the particularly credible source for the observation, because the credibility is, on close examination, structurally important to how the line lands.
Williams was someone whose public presentation was, by every available account, considerably more cheerful than his private interior. He was, on the available evidence, fighting various battles that the wider audience knew nothing about throughout most of his adult life. He was, in some real way, the structural example of the asymmetry the line is pointing at. The asymmetry was operating in his own case. The wider audience did not know what he was carrying. The wider audience found out, eventually, through the worst possible mechanism for finding out.
The line is, on close examination, what someone in his position would say to the rest of us if they wanted us to take seriously the structural fact that they had been living inside. The line is not a piece of generic kindness-advocacy. The line is, more accurately, a specific recommendation from someone who knew, from the inside, what it was like to be the person carrying something the wider environment was structurally unable to see.
The credibility of the source is what gives the line the weight that the standard inspirational framing tends to flatten. The line is, in some real way, the testimony of someone who had been on both sides of the asymmetry, and who was asking the rest of us to operate as if we knew what he had known, which was that the surface presentation of the other adults in our lives is, in most cases, considerably less accurate than the wider environment has trained us to assume.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The line Williams said, or some version of it, is on close examination one of the more substantive pieces of practical ethics the wider culture has absorbed in recent decades. The line is not, primarily, an exhortation to be nice. The line is, more accurately, a structural observation paired with a practical recommendation. The observation is that the interior weather of other adults is structurally invisible to anyone except themselves. The recommendation is that, given this invisibility, one should default to kindness in one’s encounters, because the expected value of the default is, on the available structural facts, higher than the expected value of any alternative.
The recommendation is harder to act on than the standard framing tends to imply. The recommendation requires the active retrieval, in the middle of ordinary encounters, of a structural fact that the default operating system has been keeping suppressed. The recommendation requires the overriding of the various small local incentives that the situation is producing. The recommendation requires the giving-up of various small satisfactions that the alternative would have produced.
The recommendation is worth acting on anyway. The acting-on is what the line is, in some real way, calibrated to elicit. Williams himself was, by his own example, a particularly credible source for the elicitation. The line was, in his case, the testimony of someone who had been carrying interior weather the wider audience could not see. The line is, in the rest of our cases, the small ongoing reminder that the same is true of almost everyone we encounter. The reminder is what is available. The acting-on is, more modestly, what the rest of one’s adult life is, in some real way, the structural opportunity to do.
