The wish that goes to someone else

There is a habit people have that makes almost no sense, and nobody seems to find it odd. You hear that someone you barely know is having a bad time, and something in you turns towards them and says, quietly and without an audience, I hope it goes all right for them. Then you go back to what you were doing. Nothing has been sent. Nothing has arrived. The whole event happened inside one skull and stopped there.

By any account of why people do things, this should have been weeded out long ago. It costs a small amount of attention, which is the one thing genuinely in short supply. It returns nothing at all. The person it is aimed at will never know, and if they did know it would not change their circumstances by a gram. And yet nearly everybody does it, several times a week, without ever deciding to.

It is not a transaction and it is not pretending to be one

The easy explanation is that we are buying something. A small warm feeling for ourselves, a sense of being a decent sort. There is probably a bit of that in it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the feeling is very thin. If you are honest about what it actually feels like to wish a stranger well, it is barely a feeling at all. It is closer to a small adjustment of posture. You would not cross the road for it.

Nor is it a negotiation with anything. Very few people who wish well for a stranger believe a mechanism is involved. They are not putting a request in. They know, in the same breath, that the wish will not travel and will not land. The unlikely part is not that they believe it works. It is that they do it while being fully aware that it does not.

What it is actually for

Here is the best account I have. Wishing for someone else is not an action taken on the world. It is a decision about who you are pointing at.

Most of the time, attention runs inward by default. Your own week, your own list, your own low-grade worry about the thing on Thursday. That is not a character failing, it is just where the machinery sits when nothing pushes it. Wishing for another person is a small push. For a second or two, the centre of the picture is someone who is not you, and they are there on their own terms, not as somebody who wants something from you or owes you anything.

That is a rare arrangement. Almost every other time we think about another person, they are entangled with us. They are a colleague we need something from, a friend we owe a reply, a relative whose mood affects our weekend. A stranger you wish well for is the only person you will think about all day who is purely and entirely themselves.

What it says about us, carefully

I want to be careful about the conclusion here, because this is where writing on the subject usually goes soft. It would be easy to say that this proves people are fundamentally good, that kindness is our natural state and the rest is a distortion. I do not think that follows and I do not think it is true.

Plenty of people who wish well for strangers are unkind to the people actually in front of them. The wish is cheap, and the fact that it is cheap is exactly why it survives. It does not require you to be a good person. It requires you to have, for a moment, nothing in the way.

What it does show is narrower, and I think more interesting. It shows that the concern is already there, sitting under everything, and that it will surface the instant nothing is competing with it. The default is not indifference. Indifference is what happens when we are busy. Take the busyness away for three seconds and out comes a wish for somebody we will never meet.

That is a modest claim. It does not make anyone virtuous. But it does mean that the coldness most of us assume is the baseline is not the baseline at all. It is traffic.

The version that goes outward

There is a second form of this, and it is different in one important way. Sometimes the wish is written down, or said, or left where another person can find it. The internal part is the same. What changes is that now someone might read it.

The odd thing is that the reader usually cannot tell whether it was meant for them. Somebody wished for a person having a hard week, and you were having a hard week, and the wish fits. It was not addressed to you and it lands anyway. People describe being caught out by this. Something written by a stranger with no idea you exist reads as though it knew.

I do not think that is mystical. It is just that our troubles are far less original than we believe them to be. The thing you cannot say to anyone has been sat with, in almost your exact words, by tens of thousands of people. A wish written blindly for a person in difficulty will fit an enormous number of people, because there are an enormous number of people in difficulty, and we are all in difficulty in roughly the same handful of ways.

That should probably be deflating and somehow it is not. Being unoriginal in your suffering turns out to be the mechanism by which a stranger's words reach you at all.

The small honest defence

So what do we say for it, in the end. Not that it helps. It does not. Nobody's rent gets paid, nobody's scan comes back clear, because somewhere a stranger held them in mind for four seconds.

What we can say is that it is the only thing available. There are a great many people whose situation you can do nothing whatsoever about. The choice is not between wishing and helping. It is between wishing and turning away, and those are not morally equivalent even when they are practically identical.

And the habit does not stay where you put it. Someone who routinely notices strangers enough to wish them well is someone who is in the practice of noticing strangers, and that practice shows up later, in situations where something can actually be done. I am not claiming the wish causes the help. I am saying they grow from the same soil, and you do not get much of the second in a person who never does the first. There is more on the modest, non-world-changing scale of that in a piece on small acts.

On Drestela, people leave wishes for others without knowing who will read them, which makes the whole thing about as unrewarded as an act can get. That seems to be the condition under which people are most willing to do it. If you want the argument for what a stranger's attention is worth on its own, there is an article on wishing someone well, and another on what strangers come to mean to each other.