Imagine you’re in the heart of New York City—for example, on the steps of Madison Square Garden. One of the very first things you would notice there, no matter the time of day or the weather, would be the pungent aroma of burning reefer. This would also be the case if you found yourself at the entrance to the Q train at Union Square, or at a chessboard in Washington Square Park, or under some scaffolding erected on any random block in SoHo. Smelling cannabis has become an inescapable feature of living in (or visiting) the city, an emblem of life in New York akin to sipping a crème at a café table in Paris or strolling through Rome eating a gelato. In some parts of Midtown, weed aromas pump through the streets like those bizarre plumes of steam that blow continuously from orange-striped tubes at intersections.

Not so long ago, the United States took a draconian approach to marijuana. As recently as 2017, New York City alone recorded more than 18,000 arrests for weed possession, down from a peak of more than 50,000 in 2011. Some 93 percent of those 2017 arrests were for possession in public view or public consumption. In 2021, New York State approved legislation to legalize recreational marijuana, and adults may now smoke it wherever they can smoke tobacco. By the end of 2022, the grand total of marijuana arrests and summonses—in this city of 8.5 million inhabitants—had fallen to 179. It is an unmistakably good thing that New York, along with much of American society, has abandoned the puritanical War on Drugs absolutism that sought to prevent otherwise law-abiding adults from ever getting high on pain of criminal prosecution. Anti-marijuana laws from a previous, stricter era were not only hypocritical and ineffective—everyone who wanted to smoke weed could still do so; they were enforced to an extremely unequal measure, falling much harder on Black and Latino citizens. The old regime was clearly unsustainable.

[David A. Graham: Biden goes to pot]

But too much of a good thing can pose an entirely new set of problems, and two competing truths often exist simultaneously. The computer scientists Dylan Hadfield-Menell and Simon Zhuang argue that optimizing the pursuit of any given goal will lead to unanticipated consequences, including the achievement of ends that are antithetical to the original objective. In a recent podcast, the physicist Max Tegmark provided a concrete example of this idea. Pretend you’ve programmed a car to drive from Boston to New York City by telling it to go as southward as physically possible. Eventually, it will arrive in Manhattan, but without any further steps to redirect or halt its movement, it will inevitably keep going all the way to Florida. Tegmark says that the principle can be applied to the development of artificial intelligence. It can also help make sense of why I can’t step outside without smelling marijuana.

The desire to correct past wrongs hasn’t just resulted in marijuana smoking becoming permissible in most areas where tobacco smoking is allowed. Because of a larger disinclination toward any punitiveness at all, blunt-smoking can now be observed even where cigarettes are considered inappropriate or offensive. Police aren’t enforcing the law where it still holds. It is progress that people are no longer facing jail time for personal weed possession; it does not follow, however, that Americans should accept a total erosion of the etiquette around public consumption in shared and non-designated spaces. The car has traveled way past New York City and is on a ferry to Patagonia.

Several months ago, coming into New York City from the liberal-arts college in the Hudson Valley where I teach—where, for what it’s worth, I have never seen anyone openly smoking—I complained offhandedly on Twitter about the omnipresent aroma of cannabis. This wasn’t even an original observation. In 2018, as the city was still in the early stages of shifting its drug policy, Ginia Bellafante wrote in The New York Times that marijuana is the “signature olfactory experience of New York.” And last year, the mayor, Eric Adams, joked at a press conference, “The No. 1 thing I smell right now is pot. It’s like everybody’s smoking a joint now.”

I received a huge amount of pushback for my remark (in addition to quite a lot of agreement), much of it premised on the idea that any social response to public weed smell would inevitably result in the warehousing of Black and brown bodies. In fact, I don’t want the police to put public weed-smokers in jail. I simply think New Yorkers should do a better job of policing themselves: a middle ground in which smokers of any color exercise discretion where the law employs restraint.

[Sarah Milov: Marijuana reform should focus on inequality]

The pushback against my complaint is ongoing. Last week, in the libertarian magazine Reason, Liz Wolfe published an article titled “New York City Should Have Always Smelled Like Pot,” in which she opens with a rebuttal of my tweet. Hers is about the most compelling argument I’ve seen in favor of the new normal, and to her credit, she declines to partake in the customary gaslighting that would deny that a change has occurred in the first place. “The smell of weed in the streets,” Wolfe argues, “is a sign of progress and tolerance, not decline.”

Tolerance is a wonderful value in principle. And as the intolerant have long understood, it is also a value that can be easily exploited. It works best when buttressed by agreed-upon standards and a common investment in informal norms. “Some of today’s stoners do have a bit too much chutzpah,” Wolfe concedes, “like the guy I saw on the G train rolling a joint at 9 a.m. on an especially packed train car.” That experience rings familiar. On a recent Monday morning, I boarded an overflowing L train from Williamsburg into Manhattan, the entire car reeking of freshly puffed ganja. Progress demands that elderly people and small children must also inhale this? Something is perversely unserious about a culture that insists the answer is yes and that you are some kind of “Karen” if you beg to differ.  

“Fellow New Yorkers who have long tolerated cigarette smoke clogging up the public airways,” Wolfe writes, “should offer the same grace to weed.” But cigarette smokers haven’t had their way for two decades now, and anyone who would dare light a Marlboro on the subway today would receive the most withering glare—and possibly risk physical assault—because we now have not only laws but also real taboos around the spreading of secondhand smoke. Which is one reason you barely smell cigarettes at all, even in the streets, parks, and plazas where the scent of weed prevails.

The reflex to dismiss any criticism of violations against communal consideration exemplifies an evolving progressive politics, what the writer Michael Shellenberger has referred to as an ethos of “left-libertarianism.” In ways large and small, it has degraded urban spaces. In the absence of wider unspoken controls, the anything-goes mentality flirts with pandemonium. Turned up to a certain pitch, it produces something much worse than a public nuisance: It encourages self-reinforcing disorder. Look at San Francisco or Portland, Oregon, where tent encampments and open hard-drug use have in some districts made healthy and productive activity all but impossible. New York is by no means at a West Coast level of decline, but such states of decay are not binary. They operate along a dismal continuum, and public spaces forfeit structure by gradation. Broken windows left untended really do tell larger stories.

When is the last time you’ve seen someone pounding shots of vodka on the subway? You haven’t, and for good reason. Drug possession was once a crime as well as a taboo. Now that we’ve optimized the admirable goal of ensuring that it isn’t the former, we need a redirect to preserve the latter.

Kindness and niceness, though both excellent personal qualities, are not the same thing. The former is to be good to others; the latter is about being pleasant. They don’t even have to go together. Some say, for example, that New Yorkers are kind but not nice (“Your tire is flat, you moron—hand me your jack”), in contrast to Californians, who are nice but not kind (“Looks like you’ve got a flat tire there—have a good day!”).

Despite the traits’ practical differences, social scientists generally don’t separate niceness and kindness, but lump them together as “prosocial behavior.” The category includes such actions as helping others without solicitation or reward, donating to a charity, and giving someone a compliment. Research shows that being prosocial clearly raises happiness, more so than treating yourself. The converse is true too: A recent review of the academic literature found that happier people act more prosocially. In short, for the sake of your own well-being, there are good reasons to try to be kind.

[Read: The inequality of happiness]

Unfortunately, we fail a lot. Usually, we behave poorly because others are not nice to us. For example, you might resolve to be better to your spouse, and start the day with the best of intentions. But at breakfast, your spouse offhandedly says something you interpret as criticism. You react unkindly, which provokes anger and starts an argument. The best way to avoid this negative cycle is to jump-start and reinforce the opposite kind of feedback loop: one in which kindness leads to happiness, and happiness to kindness.

Most of us consider ourselves to be good to others. According to one British study, 98 percent of people think of themselves as nicer than most. If this were true (and mathematically possible), we would all constantly be helping our neighbors, getting happier, and wanting to help even more. This is the principle of the prosocial feedback loop.

Unfortunately, the virtuous cycle is easily interrupted. Sometimes, it happens by accident: You get a text while shopping that your kid has failed math, then you’re impatient with the checkout clerk. But in many cases, bad actors are to blame—people who punish prosocial behavior and turn good feelings bad.

To examine this phenomenon in a laboratory setting, in the 2000s, researchers conducted “public-goods experiments” in 16 communities worldwide. These are experiments in which people have to decide whether to contribute publicly and voluntarily to a pool of investments whose gains will be distributed to the entire group regardless of original offering. Participants then react to others’ contributions with either acceptance or punitive action. The researchers found that in communities without strong norms of civic cooperation, antisocial actors punished more generous contributors.

[Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz: What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life]

You know instinctively who these kindness–happiness interrupters are. In a 2014 paper titled “Trolls Just Want to Have Fun,” three psychologists studied the behavior of people who enjoy posting negative and abusive material on the internet to harass and upset others. The researchers found that trolling correlated positively with malign personality traits such as psychopathy and Machiavellianism (elements of the so-called dark triad). Additional research has shown that about 7 percent of the population can be classified as dark-triad personalities—in other words, the trolls are among us.

Even if you don’t have such traits, when you’re punished for your kindness, you’re likely to reciprocate. Here’s what that suggests about real life: Imagine you start the day with every intention of behaving kindly, and the expectation that you will get happier as a result. To this end, you might post something upbeat on social media to brighten someone’s day. Routinely—given that social media is the ultimate low-cooperation community—you get a trollish response back, denouncing what you said as completely idiotic. Now unhappier, you respond with an insult of your own. And down you go.

To make sure our good intentions last through the whole day, we need to keep the good feedback going, and avoid the interruptions. Here are three strategies for staying on the kind, happy path.

1.  Start (And Restart) the Loop
Begin each day with the resolution that you will treat others in a kindly, pleasant manner. Follow this up with a tangible act of kindness as soon as you can. For example, on your morning commute, let someone into traffic, and smile at the person as you do so. You will probably feel happier.

If someone interrupts this kind–happy loop, remember that your reaction can restart the cycle. For example, if, like me, you live in Boston, the person you let into traffic is as likely to give you the finger as they are to thank you. In such a situation, don’t do what comes naturally. Instead, say to yourself, “I will not let this person interrupt my happiness cycle.” If that feels absurd, laugh at yourself and do it anyway.

2. Avoid Interruptions
Some disruptions to your virtuous cycle are inevitable. But you can game the system by steering clear of certain areas of life that tend to be especially dominated by people who enjoy causing interruptions. If your workplace is full of trolls, consider finding a new job. If you live in a city or neighborhood with low cooperation and a generally unfriendly spirit, consider moving. It probably goes without saying that you should examine your social-media use and ask whether it passes the cost-benefit test for your well-being. Maybe you could visit a platform with kinder norms than the one you are on. Or maybe it is time to say goodbye to that one altogether.

3. Don’t Disrupt the Cycle Yourself
Unfortunately, even if you aren’t a troll, odds are you’ll occasionally interrupt the kind–happy loop for others. Sometimes, when you are having a bad day, someone else’s kindness might simply annoy you, and you might react badly.

As you go about your day, remember that the virtuous cycle is fragile, and the feedback you create goes beyond a simple bad reaction. When you do slip, acknowledge it and say you are sorry. This small act of contrition might in itself restart the feedback loop, putting you—and the other person—on a good path toward greater happiness. For example, if you did misinterpret your spouse’s comment as criticism or snap at the grocery clerk, apologize quickly and go out of your way to do something nice.

The feedback loop, of course, operates on an individual level. But it also has the potential to spread through networks of people and affect an entire culture. I believe that the United States is in a negative feedback loop of unhappiness and hostile behavior. Politics, for example, is dominated by hostility. People who don’t pay attention to politics can hardly escape the daily news, which has become a geyser of bad feelings. A 2022 article in the science journal PLOS One showed that over the past two decades, the language of headlines has hugely increased in anger, disgust, fear, and sadness.

These constant disruptions to the national kind–happy cycle lower everyone’s happiness: Unhappier citizens support negative politicians and consume angry news media, which beget unhappier citizens. One might even speculate that our system could elevate trolls who feed on negativity to high office (or that it has already done so).

[Arthur C. Brooks: Ben Franklin’s radical theory of happiness]

The solution, if we are up to the task, is to interrupt this cultural doom loop with a policy agenda intended to work for the majority instead of against political enemies, media that lift people up, and leaders who are in the positive mainstream, not on the angry fringes. Such a future wouldn’t magically make our problems disappear. Legitimate disagreements will still divide us, and trolls will still try to do so with illegitimate ones. But the disagreements wouldn’t so commonly become insults and threats, and trolls would have less power.

Then again, as you might decide to note on social media, this may all be completely idiotic. In that case, I hope you have a nice day.

Japan has very different ideas on how to evacuate its nationals from war zones compared to countries like the United States.