About BeingKind

Most lists of kind acts fail in the same two ways. They are vague — “brighten someone’s day” is not a thing you can do on a Tuesday — and they never say why anything works. So you read forty of them and do none.

Every idea here is concrete enough to start within a minute of reading it, and every one explains the reason it lands. That reason is usually the interesting part, and it is almost always the part that gets left out.

Each idea says what to do, why it matters to the person on the other end, roughly how long it takes and what it costs. Where something involves a person in a hard situation, it also says the one thing to be careful about, because good intentions are not the same as getting it right.

You can browse by how long you have, what you want to spend, who you are with or who it is for.

When you mark something as done, you can start a ripple. You get a short code — two words and a number, the sort of thing that survives being written on the back of a receipt or said out loud — and you hand it to whoever you did the kind thing for.

When they do something kind, they add themselves to the chain, and pass the code on again. Anyone holding it can see how far it has travelled and who it went through. That is the whole mechanic, and it is where the site gets its name.

Chains are not listed anywhere and are never indexed by search engines. The only way into one is to be handed the code, which is the point of having a code at all.

Every entry is written by hand for this site and read by a person before it goes live. A good deal of the library is about grief, illness and caring for somebody, so how it is written and checked is set out in full.

You can tell us you did something, and the count on the page goes up by one. That is the whole mechanism. There are no points, no streaks, no badges and no ranking of anybody against anybody.

This is deliberate. Attaching a score to kindness changes why people do it, and gives them a reason to claim things they did not do. The counts here are unverifiable by design, so they are labelled honestly — people say they did this — and never dressed up as ratings or reviews.

There are no accounts, and nothing on the site requires an email address. You can read everything, mark things as done and start a chain without giving us one.

If you mark something as done you may add a one-line note, a first name and a town — all optional, all free text, and none of it verified or used to build a profile. We do not store raw IP addresses; rate limiting uses a salted hash that rotates, which is enough to stop abuse and useless for tracking anyone.

There is one monthly email you can ask for, and it is the only place an address is collected. It is kept apart on purpose: the address is not linked to the cookie, to anything you marked as done or to a chain you started, and what the email contains comes from the situations you ticked and the public library.

The full version, including how long anything is kept, is on the privacy page. Everything held for your browser — and a button that deletes it — is on this device.