07/08/2025
Timing and Humanity
Written By Dr. Donald Peterson
There's something magnificently tragic about kindness that arrives fashionably late to the party, like showing up to a funeral with birthday cake or texting "you up?" at 3 AM to someone who's been happily married for fifteen years. It's the emotional equivalent of bringing an umbrella to a drought technically correct in concept, catastrophically wrong in ex*****on.
Imagine you're seventeen, drowning in the churning waters of teenage angst, desperately needing someone anyone to throw you a life preserver of understanding. Fast-forward twenty years, and suddenly everyone's a marine biologist, eager to explain how you should have handled those turbulent waters. "You know," they say, settling into their armchairs of retrospective wisdom, "I always thought you were going through a rough patch back then."
Well, congratulations, Sherlock. You've cracked the case of the Obviously Struggling Teenager. Here's your badge and a participation trophy for showing up two decades after the investigation closed.
This phenomenon let's call it Temporal Kindness Displacement Syndrome (TKDS, for those keeping score at home) afflicts us all. It's the human condition's cruelest joke: we develop the capacity for profound empathy and understanding precisely when it can no longer alter the past. We become emotional archaeologists, excavating moments where our kindness might have mattered, only to find the sites have long been paved over with the concrete of consequence.
Consider the workplace dynamics we've all witnessed. There's always that colleague let's call him Gary who spent three years making your professional life feel like a cross between a medieval torture chamber and a particularly sadistic game show. Gary questioned every decision, undermined every presentation, and somehow managed to suck the joy out of casual Friday with the efficiency of an industrial vacuum cleaner.
Then, on your last day, as you're packing your desk plants and wondering if you can fit your stapler in your pocket without anyone noticing, Gary appears with a heartfelt card. "You know," he says, suddenly resembling a human being rather than a corporate gargoyle, "I've always really respected your work ethic. I probably should have said something sooner."
The audacity is breathtaking. It's like setting someone's house on fire and then showing up to the smoldering ruins with a garden hose and a sheepish grin. The gesture is kind, sure, but it's also spectacularly, almost artistically useless.
Neuroscientists tell us that our brains are remarkable machines, constantly rewiring themselves based on new experiences and insights. This neuroplasticity is wonderful for learning languages and recovering from injuries, but it creates an interesting side effect: we develop wisdom precisely when we can no longer apply it to the situations that needed it most.
It's evolution's practical joke. We spend our twenties stumbling through relationships like drunken toddlers in an emotional china shop, only to develop actual relationship skills in our forties when half our friends are divorced and the other half are too tired to date. We finally understand our parents' perspectives right around the time they start forgetting ours. We become the mentors we needed when we were young, but our former selves are busy being young somewhere in the irretrievable past.
Perhaps nowhere is belated kindness more poignant and frustrating than in the realm of family dynamics. We've all heard the stories: the distant father who finally opens up during his final days, the estranged siblings who reconcile over a hospital bed, the mother who chooses her child's wedding day to finally admit she was wrong about that thing from 1987.
These moments make for beautiful movie scenes, complete with soft lighting and swelling orchestral scores. In reality, they often feel like receiving a perfectly wrapped gift that you desperately needed twenty years ago. The sentiment is lovely, but you've already figured out how to live without whatever was inside.
My friend Sarah spent her entire childhood trying to win her mother's approval, like a contestant on the world's most psychologically damaging game show. Every achievement was met with qualified enthusiasm, every milestone celebrated with the emotional intensity of someone commenting on the weather. Sarah eventually built a successful career in spite of this, developing the thick skin and self-motivation that comes from learning early that validation must come from within.
At Sarah's wedding, her mother pulled her aside and said, through tears, "I want you to know how proud I've always been of you. I just never knew how to say it." It was a beautiful moment, the kind that should have felt healing and transformative. Instead, Sarah felt a complex mixture of gratitude and frustration, like someone had finally delivered a love letter that would have changed everything if it had arrived when the relationship was still being written.
There's an economic principle at work here, though Adam Smith never wrote about it in "The Wealth of Nations". We might call it the Diminishing Returns Law of Retroactive Affection. The value of kindness, like any commodity, is partly determined by scarcity and timing. A kind word when you're struggling is worth its weight in gold. The same kind word when you've already solved the problem yourself is worth considerably less perhaps the emotional equivalent of a nice thank-you note.
This isn't to say that late kindness is worthless. It's more like receiving a winter coat in spring you appreciate the gesture, and you'll probably need it eventually, but it doesn't help with the fact that you nearly froze to death in January.
Modern society has turned belated kindness into something of an art form, particularly in the realm of public apologies. We've created an entire genre of Instagram posts that essentially say, "I was terrible to you in high school, but I've grown as a person, and here's a lengthy caption about it for all my followers to see."
These digital olive branches are fascinating anthropological specimens. They serve multiple purposes: they assuage the guilt of the apologizer, they provide social media content that makes the apologizer look thoughtful and evolved, and they occasionally provide some closure for the injured party. What they don't do is change the past or undo the damage that was done when it mattered most.
It's like a restaurant serving you a terrible meal, then sending you a beautifully written apology letter three months later along with a gift card. You appreciate the gesture, but you're still going to remember that terrible anniversary dinner every time you drive past the place.
Perhaps the most maddening aspect of belated kindness is how it highlights our own emotional growth curve. We become kinder, more empathetic, and more understanding precisely when we no longer need to be or rather, when our past selves needed us to be those things and we weren't capable of it yet.
I think about my college roommate, Kevin, who was going through what we now recognize as a serious depression during our sophomore year. At the time, I was a nineteen-year-old emotional neanderthal who thought the appropriate response to someone's obvious psychological distress was to suggest they "cheer up" or "get some exercise." I was about as helpful as a chocolate teapot and roughly as emotionally intelligent as a parking meter.
Years later, having learned something about mental health and human compassion, I reached out to Kevin with what I thought was a meaningful apology and an acknowledgment of what he'd been going through. His response was gracious but pointed: "I appreciate this, but honestly, I figured out how to deal with that stuff a long time ago. Would have been nice to hear back then, though."
We tell ourselves that it's "better late than never," but is it really? Sometimes. Other times, it's like showing up to help someone move after they've already unpacked in their new place. The gesture is appreciated, but it doesn't change the fact that they had to carry all those boxes themselves.
The truth is more nuanced than our platitudes suggest. Late kindness can be meaningful it can provide closure, demonstrate growth, and repair relationships. But it can also feel hollow, self-serving, or simply irrelevant to the person who needed it when it mattered.
This phenomenon extends beyond personal relationships into broader social and cultural contexts. Society often exhibits collective TKDS, suddenly developing compassion for groups or causes after the critical moment has passed. We build monuments to people we ignored in life, celebrate artists we dismissed during their careers, and develop social consciousness about injustices after the victims are no longer around to benefit from our enlightenment.
We're like a friend who remembers your birthday three weeks late every single year, then acts like the belated card makes up for the fact that they missed the actual day.Timing and Humanity
There's something magnificently tragic about kindness that arrives fashionably late to the party, like showing up to a funeral with birthday cake or texting "you up?" at 3 AM to someone who's been happily married for fifteen years. It's the emotional equivalent of bringing an umbrella to a drought technically correct in concept, catastrophically wrong in ex*****on.
Imagine you're seventeen, drowning in the churning waters of teenage angst, desperately needing someone anyone to throw you a life preserver of understanding. Fast-forward twenty years, and suddenly everyone's a marine biologist, eager to explain how you should have handled those turbulent waters. "You know," they say, settling into their armchairs of retrospective wisdom, "I always thought you were going through a rough patch back then."
Well, congratulations, Sherlock. You've cracked the case of the Obviously Struggling Teenager. Here's your badge and a participation trophy for showing up two decades after the investigation closed.
This phenomenon let's call it Temporal Kindness Displacement Syndrome (TKDS, for those keeping score at home) afflicts us all. It's the human condition's cruelest joke: we develop the capacity for profound empathy and understanding precisely when it can no longer alter the past. We become emotional archaeologists, excavating moments where our kindness might have mattered, only to find the sites have long been paved over with the concrete of consequence.
Consider the workplace dynamics we've all witnessed. There's always that colleague let's call him Gary who spent three years making your professional life feel like a cross between a medieval torture chamber and a particularly sadistic game show. Gary questioned every decision, undermined every presentation, and somehow managed to suck the joy out of casual Friday with the efficiency of an industrial vacuum cleaner.
Then, on your last day, as you're packing your desk plants and wondering if you can fit your stapler in your pocket without anyone noticing, Gary appears with a heartfelt card. "You know," he says, suddenly resembling a human being rather than a corporate gargoyle, "I've always really respected your work ethic. I probably should have said something sooner."
The audacity is breathtaking. It's like setting someone's house on fire and then showing up to the smoldering ruins with a garden hose and a sheepish grin. The gesture is kind, sure, but it's also spectacularly, almost artistically useless.
Neuroscientists tell us that our brains are remarkable machines, constantly rewiring themselves based on new experiences and insights. This neuroplasticity is wonderful for learning languages and recovering from injuries, but it creates an interesting side effect: we develop wisdom precisely when we can no longer apply it to the situations that needed it most.
It's evolution's practical joke. We spend our twenties stumbling through relationships like drunken toddlers in an emotional china shop, only to develop actual relationship skills in our forties when half our friends are divorced and the other half are too tired to date. We finally understand our parents' perspectives right around the time they start forgetting ours. We become the mentors we needed when we were young, but our former selves are busy being young somewhere in the irretrievable past.
Perhaps nowhere is belated kindness more poignant and frustrating than in the realm of family dynamics. We've all heard the stories: the distant father who finally opens up during his final days, the estranged siblings who reconcile over a hospital bed, the mother who chooses her child's wedding day to finally admit she was wrong about that thing from 1987.
These moments make for beautiful movie scenes, complete with soft lighting and swelling orchestral scores. In reality, they often feel like receiving a perfectly wrapped gift that you desperately needed twenty years ago. The sentiment is lovely, but you've already figured out how to live without whatever was inside.
My friend Sarah spent her entire childhood trying to win her mother's approval, like a contestant on the world's most psychologically damaging game show. Every achievement was met with qualified enthusiasm, every milestone celebrated with the emotional intensity of someone commenting on the weather. Sarah eventually built a successful career in spite of this, developing the thick skin and self-motivation that comes from learning early that validation must come from within.
At Sarah's wedding, her mother pulled her aside and said, through tears, "I want you to know how proud I've always been of you. I just never knew how to say it." It was a beautiful moment, the kind that should have felt healing and transformative. Instead, Sarah felt a complex mixture of gratitude and frustration, like someone had finally delivered a love letter that would have changed everything if it had arrived when the relationship was still being written.
There's an economic principle at work here, though Adam Smith never wrote about it in "The Wealth of Nations". We might call it the Diminishing Returns Law of Retroactive Affection. The value of kindness, like any commodity, is partly determined by scarcity and timing. A kind word when you're struggling is worth its weight in gold. The same kind word when you've already solved the problem yourself is worth considerably less perhaps the emotional equivalent of a nice thank-you note.
This isn't to say that late kindness is worthless. It's more like receiving a winter coat in spring you appreciate the gesture, and you'll probably need it eventually, but it doesn't help with the fact that you nearly froze to death in January.
Modern society has turned belated kindness into something of an art form, particularly in the realm of public apologies. We've created an entire genre of Instagram posts that essentially say, "I was terrible to you in high school, but I've grown as a person, and here's a lengthy caption about it for all my followers to see."
These digital olive branches are fascinating anthropological specimens. They serve multiple purposes: they assuage the guilt of the apologizer, they provide social media content that makes the apologizer look thoughtful and evolved, and they occasionally provide some closure for the injured party. What they don't do is change the past or undo the damage that was done when it mattered most.
It's like a restaurant serving you a terrible meal, then sending you a beautifully written apology letter three months later along with a gift card. You appreciate the gesture, but you're still going to remember that terrible anniversary dinner every time you drive past the place.
Perhaps the most maddening aspect of belated kindness is how it highlights our own emotional growth curve. We become kinder, more empathetic, and more understanding precisely when we no longer need to be or rather, when our past selves needed us to be those things and we weren't capable of it yet.
I think about my college roommate, Kevin, who was going through what we now recognize as a serious depression during our sophomore year. At the time, I was a nineteen-year-old emotional neanderthal who thought the appropriate response to someone's obvious psychological distress was to suggest they "cheer up" or "get some exercise." I was about as helpful as a chocolate teapot and roughly as emotionally intelligent as a parking meter.
Years later, having learned something about mental health and human compassion, I reached out to Kevin with what I thought was a meaningful apology and an acknowledgment of what he'd been going through. His response was gracious but pointed: "I appreciate this, but honestly, I figured out how to deal with that stuff a long time ago. Would have been nice to hear back then, though."
We tell ourselves that it's "better late than never," but is it really? Sometimes. Other times, it's like showing up to help someone move after they've already unpacked in their new place. The gesture is appreciated, but it doesn't change the fact that they had to carry all those boxes themselves.
The truth is more nuanced than our platitudes suggest. Late kindness can be meaningful it can provide closure, demonstrate growth, and repair relationships. But it can also feel hollow, self-serving, or simply irrelevant to the person who needed it when it mattered.
This phenomenon extends beyond personal relationships into broader social and cultural contexts. Society often exhibits collective TKDS, suddenly developing compassion for groups or causes after the critical moment has passed. We build monuments to people we ignored in life, celebrate artists we dismissed during their careers, and develop social consciousness about injustices after the victims are no longer around to benefit from our enlightenment.
We're like a friend who remembers your birthday three weeks late every single year, then acts like the belated card makes up for the fact that they missed the actual day. Again.
So what's the solution? How do we escape the curse of perpetually misplaced compassion? The answer is both simple and impossibly difficult: we need to cultivate the courage to be kind in real time, even when it's uncomfortable, inconvenient, or uncertain.
This means checking in on people when they're struggling, not just when we remember months later. It means offering support during the crisis, not just reflecting on how we should have helped after it's over. It means having difficult conversations when they matter, not after everyone has moved on.
Real-time kindness requires us to act on incomplete information, to risk being awkward or unwelcome, to extend ourselves when we don't know if it will be received well. It's messy and imperfect, but it's also present literally and figuratively.
None of this is to say that late kindness is always futile. Sometimes the timing works out in unexpected ways. Sometimes people are ready to receive an apology or acknowledgment years after the initial hurt. Sometimes the late arrival of understanding can heal old wounds or open new possibilities for connection.
The key is approaching belated kindness with humility rather than expectation. Offer it as a gift, not as a demand for forgiveness or gratitude. Recognize that your timing might be off, that the other person might have moved on, that your gesture might matter less than you hope it will.
In the end, the question "What use is kindness if it comes too late?" doesn't have a simple answer. Sometimes it's tremendously useful healing, connecting, transforming. Sometimes it's about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
But here's the thing: we keep offering it anyway, because that's what humans do. We stumble through life with imperfect timing and belated wisdom, occasionally getting it right but more
