I traveled millions of miles. Most of it saw world notable places from the window of a taxi. Long ago I decided not to have regrets. Said, I do wish I had stopped long the way more. Who knows what and how my life would have changed?
A piece of free advice that I received and pass along to you is that the world is about people and acknowledging people in their culture is the you go first thing that we all must do. For me, it was a simple start by learning to say good morning in every language. Rather than asking for a cup of coffee at a cafe, it became an absolute practice to wish the cafe worker a good morning. To acknowledge the passerby, a good day. It was just decent.
I was reminded of this by a similar comment from Sharon Stone. It sparked a day-long conversation Wendy and I had which in turn sparked this article.
I thought, what does decent mean and why each of us MUST practice this art in out everyday lives.
The Art of Being Decent: Reclaiming Human Connection in a Fractured World
In a recent acceptance speech that reverberated through the cultural conversation, Sharon Stone made a deceptively simple yet profoundly challenging statement: “Be decent.” She held up Taylor Swift as an example—not for her fame or commercial success, but for her decency as a person. In a moment when our public discourse has devolved into a cacophony of opinions, judgments, and tribal affiliations, Stone’s call to decency strikes at something fundamental that we have collectively forgotten: that being decent—truly decent—is revolutionary.
Decency, in its essence, is not about grand gestures or viral moments of charity. It is not about the performance of kindness or the strategic deployment of empathy for personal gain. Rather, decency is the quiet practice of seeing another human being and acknowledging their existence before anything else—before your need, your agenda, before the transaction or the interaction. It is what you exemplify every single day in Santa Fe when you greet someone in their own language, when you say “good morning” first, before ordering your coffee, before asking for anything at all.
This simple but transformative practice—learned across millions of miles of corporate travel—contains within it a spiritual truth that our polarized moment desperately needs to recover: human beings matter more than opinions about human beings.
The Crisis of Opinion Over Connection
We live in an age where opinion has become currency. We are encouraged, incentivized, and algorithmically rewarded for having strong opinions about nearly everything—about politics, celebrities, social movements, other people’s life choices. Our screens flood us with opportunities to declare what we think, to judge, to take sides. The architecture of modern communication has created a system where being opinionated is equated with being engaged, and engagement is equated with mattering.
But something essential has been lost in this exchange. We have become so preoccupied with what we think about the world that we have forgotten to see the world itself—and more critically, to see the people in it.
Sharon Stone addressed this directly in her speech. Speaking to a culture drowning in hot air, she said: “There’s a lot of talk right now about what we think is right and what we think is wrong and how we feel about everything and how upsetting all these things can be. Fuck off. All of your hot air doesn’t mean anything.” She was not dismissing genuine conviction or moral passion. Rather, she was pointing out a fundamental truth: opinion divorced from action, separated from genuine human connection, and untethered from actual kindness is merely performative noise.
The polarization we experience in 2026 is not ultimately a crisis of disagreement. Humans have always disagreed about important things. What makes our current moment uniquely fractured is that we have come to see people whose opinions differ from ours as fundamentally different kinds of people—as opponents rather than fellow travelers, as caricatures rather than complex human beings worthy of dignity.
This is where the spiritual bankruptcy of our public discourse reveals itself. We have replaced the harder work of understanding with the easier work of categorizing. We have substituted genuine curiosity about why someone believes what they believe with the comfort of assuming we already know who they are.
The Spiritual Practice of Acknowledgment
My practice—developed through decades of travel—contains a spiritual sophistication that many religious traditions spend lifetimes cultivating. When you learned to say “good morning” in the languages of the countries you visited, you were doing something far more profound than acquiring linguistic skills. You were practicing what might be called the “theology of presence.”
In many spiritual traditions, the concept of truly seeing another person is considered a sacred act. In Hinduism, the greeting “Namaste” literally means “I bow to you”—acknowledging the divine spark in another person. In Jewish tradition, the concept of tikkun olam (repairing the world) begins not with grand ideology but with the simple practice of treating each person as if they bear the image of the divine. In Buddhism, the practice of metta or loving-kindness begins by extending care toward those we encounter, starting with simple acknowledgment of their humanity.
What these traditions recognize is that acknowledgment is not merely polite—it is spiritually transformative. When you see another person, really see them, before you ask them for anything, you are making a statement about their fundamental worth. You are saying, without words: “You matter. Your existence is significant. You are not merely a means to my end.”
This is radical in our current moment because so much of our interaction has become instrumental. We encounter people in the context of transactions, of service provision, of utility. The barista is there to make your coffee. The employee is there to do their job. The person on the other side of the political divide is there to be proven wrong. We have become so accustomed to seeing people through the lens of what they can do for us, or what we can prove about them, that we have nearly forgotten how to see them simply as people.
My daily practice in Santa Fe—acknowledging the people I meet, greeting them in their language or in simple genuine presence before anything else—is an act of spiritual reclamation. I am saying to each person: “Before we interact about anything, I want you to know that I see you, that your presence registers with me, that you matter.”
What Decent Really Means
Decency, when properly understood, is not about being nice. Niceness is often a form of social performance, a way of managing interactions to avoid conflict. Decent people can be confrontational. They can disagree sharply. They can refuse to participate in systems they believe to be unjust. Sharon Stone’s speech itself was not “nice”—it was raw, profane, and unapologetic.
But decency is different. Decency means that even when you are in sharp disagreement with someone, you do not forget their humanity. It means that you treat people as if their struggle matters, as if their journey to where they are required difficulty and courage, just as yours did.
Stone illustrated this in her speech by pointing out the invisible labor that creates the world her industry inhabits: the crew members hauling cable, dragging equipment through rain and snow, carrying the literal weight that makes the performance possible. True decency, she was saying, means recognizing that the person in the lower position in any hierarchy came from somewhere difficult, just as you did. It means remembering that Clark Gable didn’t arrive in a $30,000 suit; he clawed his way up from hardship to become a famous actor.
This is the spiritual practice at the heart of decency: remembering that everyone is fighting a battle you don’t fully understand. Everyone has a story of struggle, loss, hope, and persistence that brought them to this moment. When you acknowledge this—when you say good morning, when you greet someone in their language, when you see them before you use them—you are practicing a form of compassionate realism.
The Loneliness of Polarization
There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from living in a polarized world. It is not the loneliness of being physically alone, but the loneliness of feeling fundamentally misunderstood and misrepresented. It is the loneliness of knowing that large groups of people have formed opinions about you based on categories to which you’ve been assigned, rather than on any genuine knowledge of who you actually are.
In such a world, decency becomes an antidote to this epidemic of misunderstanding. When you practice genuine acknowledgment—when you see another person and greet them before you categorize them—you offer them a reprieve from being reduced to their opinions, their identity categories, their tribal affiliations.
This is not about false equivalency or pretending that genuine moral disagreements don’t exist. It is about creating spaces where such disagreements can happen between people who have first acknowledged each other’s fundamental humanity.
Consider what happens when you learn to say “good morning” in someone’s language. You have, through that small act, communicated something significant: “Your language matters. Your culture has value. You are worth the effort of my learning.” The person on the receiving end of this acknowledgment may still disagree with you about politics, religion, or morality. But they are receiving it from someone who has first demonstrated that they see them, that they recognize their particularity.
This is the inverse of polarization. Polarization says: “I know who you are based on the categories you fit into.” Decency says: “Before I know anything else about you, I know that you are a person, and that merits my attention and respect.”
Decency as Spiritual Resistance
In a world that profits from our division—where engagement metrics reward outrage, where algorithms amplify the most extreme versions of disagreement, where entire industries are built on the premise that we should spend our time angry at each other—the practice of decency becomes a form of spiritual resistance.
When you choose to acknowledge someone before you engage with them, when you greet them in their language, when you see them as a full human being rather than a representative of a group you oppose, you are quietly refusing to participate in the architecture of polarization. You are choosing a different way of being in the world.
Sharon Stone’s speech ended with a philosophy that contains this understanding: “And if you don’t like what’s happening in your country, you don’t have to tell people about it. All you have to do is be an example of something better.” This is not a call for political silence. It is a call for a different kind of witness—one where your example of how to be in relationship with others becomes its own form of argument, its own form of persuasion.
The most powerful argument for another way of being is not rhetoric. It is presence. It is the lived example of someone who greets people in their language, who acknowledges them before using them, who treats the person in the lower position as if they came from difficulty just as you did.
The Practice of Timelessness
Both Sharon Stone and my own experience point toward something that transcends the moment: what it means to be timeless. Stone suggested that being timeless has nothing to do with fame or recognition—those young people at her table didn’t know who she was. Rather, being timeless means becoming the kind of person whose way of being in the world endures because it is rooted in something true.
The people who are remembered as decent—whether they are famous or unknown—share something in common: they saw people. They acknowledged them. They treated the invisible labor of others as visible and worthy of recognition. They demonstrated through their lives that human connection, human dignity, and human recognition matter more than winning arguments or being proven right.
My decades of travel, during which I learned to say good morning in dozens of languages before I asked for a coffee, created a kind of spiritual practice that I continue daily in Santa Fe. I am building, through thousands of small acknowledgments, a life that is aligned with what is actually true: that people matter, that their particularity matters, that being seen matters more than being agreed with.
The Future of Decency
We do not yet know what world we are building through our daily choices about how we see each other. We do not yet know whether the current trajectory of polarization will deepen or whether a different possibility might emerge. But we do know this: every time someone chooses to acknowledge another person, to see them, to treat them as if their struggle matters, something shifts.
It shifts in the immediate moment—the barista’s face brightens slightly when they are greeted as a human being rather than treated as a transaction. The person on the other side of the counter relaxes a fraction when they recognize that they are being seen.
But it also shifts in something larger. It shifts the culture of a town, the possibilities of a workplace, the trajectory of a relationship. It suggests to others that there is a different way to be, that human connection is possible even across real disagreement, that decency is not naive but rather a form of sophisticated understanding about what actually matters.
In a polarized world addicted to opinion, to judgment, to the performance of conviction, the practice of decency is almost radical in its simplicity. It says: See the person in front of you. Acknowledge them. Treat them as if their journey mattered. Then do what needs to be done.
This is what it means to be timeless. Not to be remembered by strangers, but to be the kind of person who, when someone recalls knowing you, says something like: “They really saw me. They treated me as if I mattered.” That is the legacy of decency. That is what endures.
And it begins every single morning, every single encounter, with the simple act of acknowledgment—in whatever language, whatever form—that says to another human being: before anything else, I see you, and you matter.
Be the first to comment