In a world losing its moral bearings let kindness be our answer to this moment

On December 29th I attended a memorial at St George’s Cathedral for the 16-year-old friend of my son. His name was Oliver. Earlier in December he had slipped and fell off a cliff into the sea close to Nature’s Valley. My son had been friends with Oliver for a few years. And while I did not know Oliver very well, I knew enough to be struck by his kindness, the care he exuded and by his politeness.

Sadly, for me St George’s Cathedral has become a place of tragic memorials. It was where we held the memorial for my sister Beth, murdered in February 2004. A few years later, I attended the memorial of Nina, a friend of my sister’s who had died of breast cancer. I remember crying as I watched her young son run around the cathedral unaware of the gravity of what was happening around him. And now in 2025 I sat at the memorial for a young man about to enter Grade 11, who only a month earlier had been in that same cathedral as part of the end-of-year celebrations for his school.

The memorial was a deeply moving one, marked by heartfelt and sincere testimonies for a young man, experienced by those who knew him as wise and mature beyond his years. His uncle, parents, brothers, headmaster and friends described Oliver as curious, alive to the world, full of kindness, a boy who could connect deeply with people, who was always ready to help, and importantly, a young person with a deep care for others.

I sat for a while in the cathedral after the service lost in thoughts of Beth, of Nina and of Oliver. My first thought was that I did not ever want to come back to this place, redolent as it was with loss and tragedy. I began to reflect on 2025, to think about the year that was about to end, about a year that for me at least had come to symbolise a particular kind of loss. The loss of a hopeful notion of shared values and meaning on our fragile planet.

Connected but lonely

We have a world where people are more connected (digitally) than ever before, but also a world riven by loneliness. The very notion of connectedness needs a reboot. Increasingly people are considering their “relationships” with chatbots to be meaningful and significant. Let me be clear, engaging with a chatbot is not a relationship.

The American Psychological Association defines a “relationship” in two ways: “1) an association or connection between objects, events, variables or other phenomena. See also correlation; and 2) a continuing and often committed association between two or more people, as in a family, friendship, marriage, partnership, or other interpersonal link in which the participants have some degree of influence on each other’s thoughts, feelings, and actions.”

Given that Large Language Models such as ChatGPT are essentially correlation models, perhaps when somebody “falls in love” with a chatbot we should call it a “correlation” rather than a relationship. Our language has lost so much of its meaning.

On Monday, 15 October 2025, a ceasefire deal was signed between Hamas and Israel. Since then, close to 500 people have been killed by Israel in Gaza. The word “ceasefire” is used, stripped of any meaning, unmoored from fact and reality.

And throughout 2025 we were confronted daily with a suppurating malignant narcissist leading the richest and most powerful country in the world. When we couple his sociopathic lying with his callousness, sexual predation, corruption and gleeful cruelty we have something uniquely toxic.

Facts banished from public life

That it seems likely that he is also an Epstein-aligned paedophile makes a mockery of any possible sense of morals or values as foundational to leadership in the world. Facts, kindness, honesty, civility all lost, banished from public life.

There is much in the world about which to feel despondent. At these times when I feel my grasp on hope slipping I turn to my sage and go-to thinker Rebecca Solnit. In a recent article (and through many of her writings) she reminds us that we have the power to shape our future. She confronts the despair of the moment but is never cowed by it. She writes: “activism itself can generate hope because it already constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at center to face the wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side”.

My hope is that we let kindness and care for others be the things that define us in 2026. Enough lying, and cruelty and toxicity.

In 2026 could we all become a little more like Oliver. Please. DM

Prof Mark Tomlinson is the co-director of the Institute for Life Course Health Research in the Department of Global Health at Stellenbosch University.