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The 5 Forgotten “Secrets” Of Being A Decent Human
Remembering the good old days of civility
Are we meaner to each other today than we were twenty-five years ago? If you’re under forty, you wouldn’t know. If you’re over forty, the passage of time has corrupted your memory.
I’m going to answer my question, fully aware of the memory-lane bias I mentioned.
People are the same, but our environment has changed. The immediacy and anonymity of our communication make it easier to act like an asshole. It happened before the internet age too, of course. But back then you had to do it face to face, or at least over a telephone, and you always knew the other person. There were social consequences for taking things too far.
It’s normal today to berate and abuse strangers on social media. Treating strangers that way twenty-five years ago got you in trouble. It would get you in trouble today too in a face to face encounter, but that’s not where most communication takes place.
In a throwback to the early 1990s, here are five forgotten rules for being a decent human in the digital age.
Start with dignity
What does dignity mean? I bet you’d have trouble defining the word without a dictionary. Even the main dictionary sources on the…
