When I was young (7-8ish), the car I was in was t-boned and flipped upsidedown. After crawling out over broken glass and walking to the nearby gas station, a stranger got me a Sprite while the adults dealt with the insurance, cops, etc. (no one was injured)

on my first day of living in new york; i was carrying my worldly possessions in a trio of jumbo suitcases and i was having difficulty carrying them up the subway stairs to the street and blocking the path for everyone else. two people -- wordlessly and zero eye contact -- each took a suitcase out of my hand and carried it up to the top of the stairs, dropped them off where i can resume rolling them and walked away.

not a single "let me help you" or "do you need some help?"; they saw the situation and decided that helping me would help everyone else and simply did it.

this was before smartphones became a thing so i doubt that this could still happen because people's faces are too buried in screens to notice others anymore.

a lady in the grocery store once told me i look really nice today.

Can't remember any acts of kindness towards me. Only shit I do myself on a daily basis unto others, like oh I dunno, signal my turns, hold doors for people, say hello to someone who looks like they might need some human interaction. Stuff that should be commonplace, but people live in their asshat bubbles thinking about their own asshat lives instead of being just a little bit decent toward the rest of us asshats.

Goddammit. It's not hard.

When I was ~10 and visiting the US as a tourist I lost my wallet somewhere on Ellis Island and realized it only when I was about to pay for a slice of pizza at some touristy cafe, I was freaked out and a random stranger that wasn't in the queue just paid for it for me so I didn't worry. Was only like 5 bucks or something but I still think about that today. Poverty and widespread opioid addiction and HIV was so common in the country I grew up, I was not used to people not caring to waste money just to help a stranger.

When I was in college I was on my way to class and it started raining really heavy. So I decide to sit it out in a coffee shop. I got my coffee and sat down in a chair that let me see the street. I will never forget watching this play out.

I noticed a guy maybe a half a block away with an umbrella hail a cab. I dont even know why I noticed him, he caught my eye and I watched the cab move towards me and pretty much right outside the window of the coffee shop the cab stopped.

I then I noticed a women with a baby carriage. The cab stopped the back passenger door opened and she started to get herself and the kid/carriage into the cab.

Then I noticed that the guy who had originally gotten the cab had got out of the cab on the driver side back door and was in the process of hailing another cab.

The dude got a cab in a rain storm, must have noticed that women and the kid, told the cab to pull over and gave her the cab.

I was fresh off the plane moving to London and was lugging a massive and heavy suitcase up the stairs in the tube. Now, mind you, Londoners are exceptional commuters and I must have interrupted the proper flow, but one of them, very smartly dressed in a three piece sutie, just grabbed my suitcase with one hand, and left it up the staircase, kept on going at a brisk pace, not a single world, not a single glance. To this day, I’m not sure if it was kindness or sheer irritation at my cluelessness about Tube etiquette. Either way, it still makes me laugh every time I think about it.

Years ago I was working in retail, specifically a computer store. The work was boring, the customers were either rude, dismissive or both and of course, this took a toll on general morale, myself included. It didn't help that the neighboring store had, like, three songs on loop which drove every employee in earshot crazy, but that's beside the point.

One Thursday afternoon, it was business as usual. My coworkers took the day off, so I was alone, behind the till, re-evaluating my life choices and the store was empty, save for an occasional window shopper. It was December and the neighboring store changed their regular their regular short playlist of songs for another a completely different (but just as short!) Christmas-themed playlist. On loop again, of course. The store I was working in didn't have a dress code, so I wore my usual get-up: jeans and whatever T-shirt I grabbed in the morning. That day I was wearing one that my parents brought from France with this picture printed on.

While nurturing my newfound hatred for retail, a shy-looking girl came in, looking for a USB stick. I went through the usual motions, suggesting brands, explaining the differences all while trying to be as cordial as possible. She decided on a brand, so we moved to the register to finish the transaction. As I was printing the receipt, I got a simple "I like your shirt".

This caught me off-guard. I never received compliments while working. It was... nice. It took me a few seconds to compose myself again. After, I thanked her for the compliment, gave her the receipt and the item she bought and wished her a pleasant day. That girl genuinely made my day and I still think back on that interaction fondly.

I sadly cannot offer any of such stories, it never happened to me (maybe due to my resting bitch face syndrom. My wife regularly has such moments)

But I try to do these things most of the time. Like just taking strangers in the rain for a ride or giving icecream to delivery-guys in the summer or such things that seem silly to many.

Be the change you want to see in this world. And pay the kindness you received forward!

We did a little tour on our own into Germany one spring, about 20 years ago. It was only a few days, we didn't have much money and we absolutely didn't know what we were doing. We rented a car and just started wandering. It was just at the point of technology where GPS was still new. We didn't have any so we just started driving with a shitty map and no clue.

We had done some traveling in other countries before and we had met several famously obnoxious German tourists. We had partly expected to meet equally arrogant Germans in their home country.

Instead we met the most open, kind hearted, brilliant people ever. Everywhere we stopped, we'd meet three or four locals who were more than happy to give directions, recommend restaurants, bars, tea shops and sites to see.

At one point we met a truck driver who gave us a ton of information and showed us a driving route on a big format ringed binder map book. When he was done talking, he left the book. We told him he was forgetting his book and he said we could have it as it had detailed updated map info of the entire country. It was an expensive book and I knew it, so I told him not to give it away. He insisted and said he didn't mind.

I still have that map book on my shelf and whenever I see it, I think of that trip and all those people we met.

Totally loved Germany after that.

My mom and I moved to a new apartment, leaving behind basically everything we owned when I was about 17.

We made a post on Craigslist that said basically "in need of a couch, new apartment, single mom, can't afford much but can pay up to 30 dollars"

We got dozens of emails. People telling us we could have tables, chairs, pots and pans, clothes... They furnished our entire apartment for nothing.

One time I went to the store to pick up a few things for diner. I went to pay and realized i didn’t have my wallet. The person in line behind me immediately told the cashier they were covering my order. I was very grateful.

I have a friend who worked in Oman for several years. My wife and I went to visit, and the three of us were going to get dinner somewhere. We ended up parking somewhere that wasn't free, but wasn't horribly expensive either (honestly, paying for parking is pretty uncommon there from what I saw). Payment was only done in coins or through mobile. Paying with our phones didn't work, and we only had paper bills, so I went into a small shop asking if they could give me coins for a small bill.

I can't remember what the shop was for, but it wasn't anything touristy. Oman is very highly developed, but I'm always mindful about the privilege I have to travel internationally as an American. They said I could pay through mobile, which I said didn't work. The employee walked outside, asked which car was ours, and plugged our license plate into his phone. How long will we stay? Couple hours. Ok, you're all set. Cool! How much do we owe you? It's ok. No, we can pay you. No, it's ok.

He just would not take payment. Even if it was a small thing, the context and optics meant so much to me at the time. If you ever get a chance to go to Oman, I would strongly recommend it before the tourists take over.