There is a saying that goes “kill them with kindness.” The idea is to overwhelm an aggressive attack with a flood of kindness that disarms the assailant. The truth is that kindness does kill. It is a weapon equally dangerous as a firearm or a crowbar in the hands of a deranged person. A person wielding kindness is no less dangerous. The twist is, that kindness only kills the actor, and not the recipient.

This world was not built to accommodate kindness. It corrupts the kindest of souls. A kind soul is left with two options: To leave the world that does not want to abide by the amount of kindness they have to offer. The other option is to abandon their kindness and accept the cruelness of reality.

Many wanted to rid the world of cruelty and suffering. And many have died in vein with their souls depleted and broken. There is a common misconception that the world has good and evil, light and dark, kindness and cruelty. Yet the default state of the world is cruelty. It is the essence of life and the soul. Kindness is merely a mutation, a freak accident, a glitch in the natural order. To go against cruelty, to support kindness, to try to alter the way of life is an insult to the divine order of the universe.

To choose kindness is to embrace a solitary path, a journey marked by disillusionment and sorrow. In this grotesque existence, where the world appears not only indifferent to kindness but actively hostile to it, those who harbor a benevolent soul wander like ghosts, estranged and misunderstood. They are a lone tree in the middle of a storm, yet they can solely blame themselves for defying the bewitching song of kindness. It promises salvation and redemption to the broken, and a mirage of a better world.

When you offer kindness to others, you offer pieces of a finite resource that you have, you offer pieces of your soul. No matter how small these pieces, even if microscopic, they remain prone to depletion. And one day, months, or years later, you find yourself scraping for the remnants of your soul.

Yet to abandon kindness is to succumb to the existential dread, to become one with the shadowy figures. To accept the cruelty is deliverance from the illusions of kindness. To be liberated from the suffocating burden of guilt. To grant oneself the sinister liberty of exploitation and selfishness. Cruelness and exploitation is how the mightiest empires have been built, kindness is how the noblest of mankind have fallen.