What Does It Mean To Be A Good Person In 2026?
- Ummo
- 14 hours ago
- 4 min read
In 2026, being a "good" person feels more complicated than ever. In a world that often feels overwhelmingly negative, our Opinions writer, Ummo, reflects on what goodness really means and where we might still find it.
When Alysa Liu won gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics, the internet didn't just celebrate her skating, it celebrated her. Her comeback after years of burnout and dissatisfaction, her style, her bold and confident attitude. One phrase kept surfacing in the cultural zeitgeist when discussing her win: joy as an act of resistance.
And the thing is, I think about resistance a lot. I protest for the people of Palestine. I write and advocate for women’s rights. Resistance, in my mind, has always been effortful. But joyful? That was never part of my vocabulary for it.
So what does it actually mean to be joyful as an act of resistance, and what does any of this have to do with being a good person?
We live in a world where, when something bad happens (which seems to be on the daily), we are completely flooded by it. Social media means there is no real escape; suffering arrives on our screens constantly. In that context, choosing joy starts to feel less like naivety and more like a deliberate act. But I think the connection runs even deeper than that, and a poem helped me see it.
I keep returning to Small Kindnesses by Danusha Lameris, a poem about the unremarkable gestures that stitch our days together. Strangers pulling in their legs to let you pass in a crowded aisle. Someone saying "bless you" when you sneeze, a reflex inherited from the age of the Bubonic plague. The person who stops to help gather the lemons that spilled from your grocery bag. Lameris writes of how "we have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange" — and asks whether these fleeting connections might be, in fact, "the true dwelling of the holy." (You can read the poem in full at poets.org, and I'd genuinely encourage you to.)
What strikes me about this poem is how it reframes goodness. It isn't grand or heroic. It's actually the default of most people, and that feels almost radical to say, when it is so easy to conclude that the world is irredeemably broken and people are fundamentally selfish.
Growing up, my own idea of goodness was much more rigid. It meant good grades and being a good Muslim. It was a checklist, which also meant that a bad grade or a lapse in practice made me bad. Goodness was conditional, external, something I could fail at. That framing left little room for joy, curiosity, or any of the messier, more human parts of being alive.
I've since come to believe goodness is something else entirely. It is joy, not performative, but the kind that comes from being genuinely present in your own life. It is curiosity, the willingness to stay open to people and ideas that challenge you. It is empathy, the small effort of imagining someone else's interior world. It is gratitude for the unremarkable moments that Lameris catalogues so tenderly. And it is found in community, in those brief exchanges that remind us we are still close enough to pass each other a seat, a smile, and a moment of grace.
Which brings me back to Alysa Liu. In a cultural moment defined by a resurgence of conservative values, rising fascism, and the return of toxic beauty standards, her simply saying "no one can tell me what I can or can't eat" becomes something bigger.
I think we have collectively convinced ourselves that being a good person requires a kind of moral perfection, that unless we are doing everything, we are doing nothing. But that's the very thinking that leads to burnout, to paralysis, to quietly giving up.
The truth is, most of us are already good. We are the person who holds the door, who smiles at the cashier, who feels a pang when we see someone struggling. The goodness is already there. What we do with it, day by day, is the practice.
And practice can look like a lot of things. Goodness is a muscle we can exercise by boycotting, donating, educating yourself and the people around you about the causes you believe in. It can be showing up to a protest or sharing something that matters. But it can also be choosing joy when the world makes that hard. Being honest with yourself about your mistakes. Being kind to the person next to you. Apologising. Trying.
None of these things are small if you do them consistently, and none of them require you to be perfect first.
Writer’s Note:
I don’t feel like I’m good enough, never have, probably never will. I know this is a feeling that is not uncommon. I just want someone to read this to challenge the idea that they’re not good enough.
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