Wishing someone well when you do not want to

Most of the time, wishing someone well is not an act. It is punctuation. Hope it goes well. Best of luck. Thinking of you. We say it forty times a week and it means roughly what a handshake means, which is that we are being normal at each other.

There is nothing wrong with this. A language needs its polite machinery. But it does mean that anyone writing about the kindness of wishing someone well has to get past a very large volume of automated goodwill before reaching anything real.

The real thing is rarer, and you can identify it by a single test. Does it cost you anything.

The version that costs

Someone you know got the job. It was the job. You applied for it too, or you did not apply and wanted to, or you did not want that specific job but wanted the thing it represents, which is to be the kind of person that happens to.

You send the message. Congratulations, delighted for you, richly deserved. And you sit there afterwards with a feeling in your chest that is not delight, and you are now holding two things at once: what you sent and what is actually in you.

The standard advice here is that you should not have sent it unless you meant it, because otherwise you are being fake. I think that advice is wrong, and I think it does real harm. You can want good things for someone and resent them at the same time. These are not in competition. They are just both there.

The envy is information about your own situation. It is not a verdict on the friendship. What you want for them and what you feel about your own position are two separate readings, and the mistake is assuming the second one cancels the first.

So the message is not a lie. It is the accurate report of one of the two things, sent because the other one is not the recipient's problem. That is not dishonesty. That is the ordinary work of not making your friend pay for your year.

The person who hurt you

This one needs handling carefully, because there is an entire genre of writing that gets it badly wrong, and the wrongness is usually dressed up as wisdom.

The bad version says: wish your enemy well, it will set you free. Presented as a technique. Forgiveness as a productivity hack for the self, with the injured party quietly assigned the work.

I do not think anyone owes that. If somebody did something serious to you, wishing them well is not an obligation, not a stage you are behind on, and not a sign of health that you are failing to demonstrate. Plenty of people never get there about certain individuals and are otherwise entirely fine.

What I would say is narrower. There is a particular state, and most people who have been badly treated recognise it, where a good outcome for the other person feels like a loss for you. Where you would take a worse life if their life were worse too.

That state is miserable to be in. Not morally. Practically. It ties your own weather to someone you have no contact with. And the only exit I know of is being able to think about them having an unremarkable, adequate life somewhere and finding that you do not need anything further.

That is not forgiveness and should not be sold as it. It is much smaller. It is just the point at which they stop taking up room.

What it does for the person receiving it

Almost nothing, and it is worth being straight about that, because the alternative is a claim nobody can support.

A stranger wishing you well does not affect your surgery. Kind thoughts have no delivery mechanism. Anyone who tells you otherwise has moved from describing something into selling something.

What does happen is narrower and still worth having. Being told that someone thought about you when they did not have to changes, slightly, the background assumption a person is operating on. Most people going through something difficult are quietly running the theory that nobody is thinking about them at all. That theory is usually wrong and is very hard to disprove from the inside.

One message disproves it once. That is a small effect with a short half-life and it is not nothing, and the case for acts of exactly that size is made elsewhere here.

The odd case is wishing well to someone you will never identify. A line left for whoever is having the worst night in the city tonight. There is no recipient, no delivery, no confirmation, and it is still a thing people reliably do when given the opportunity.

What I notice about those is that the wisher gets something from the act itself, independently of whether it lands. Sitting down to want something specific for a person you have no information about requires you to imagine a life that is not yours, in some detail, for about a minute. That is not a large exercise. It is more than most days ask.

It is also the only form of this that is fully clean. No audience, no relationship being maintained, no credit. Wishing for someone you have never met has its own piece, and the clean part is most of why it interests me.

So the summary is unflattering and I will leave it unflattering. Most well-wishing is verbal furniture. Some of it is a person choosing, at some cost, not to make their disappointment into someone else's weather. A little of it is aimed at people who did real damage, and that version is optional and nobody is behind schedule on it.

The only part I would defend without qualification is the modest one. When you notice you have wanted something good for another person, say it. It costs a sentence. It occasionally arrives on a day when someone had concluded nobody was thinking about them, and it will not fix the day, and it will be marginally better than the version of that day where nobody said anything.

That is the entire claim. It does not scale up into anything grander and it does not need to.