I've bought journals. Multiple journals. Nice ones with good paper and inspiring quotes on the cover. I've read the research on gratitude journaling — how it rewires your brain, how it makes you more present, how five minutes a day changes everything. I believe all of it.
I have not used the journals.
Writing for yourself, in a vacuum, with no one on the other end — I can't make it stick. I've tried. It's not that I don't have thoughts worth capturing. It's that capturing them for no one feels like doing improv. Is it valuable? Yes. Does society as a whole agree it's a reasonable and rewarding activity? Also yes. Does it make me want to crawl into a hole and never come out? A third time, yes.
But writing for someone else? That I do constantly. A friend texts asking about kid undies brands I send back four paragraphs with links. Someone's navigating a rough patch at work and I'm drafting a response longer than the email they're stressed about. Give me a reason to write, and I'm all for it.
So that's what this is. HYTK is the journal I'll actually use because it has a reader on the other end. Even if that reader is hypothetical for a while. Even if it's just me and Evan talking into the internet. The act of writing to someone makes me think more carefully, say it more clearly, and actually finish the thought instead of trailing off.
That's the selfish reason. Here's the rest.
Evan and I already do this work. We research everything. Not in a cute, quirky way — in a "we've gone to bed mad because of a disagreement about dehumidifiers" way. We form opinions. We test things. We talk it through until one of us says something that makes the other go oh, that's the answer. Then someone texts us the same question a month later and we dig through old messages trying to remember what we decided.
HYTK is just giving all of that a permanent address. The thinking was already happening. We're just filing it where other people can find it too — and (let's be honest here) turning on the affiliate links while we're at it.
Now the name.
"Have You Tried Kindness" started as a Reddit handle. I was reading some thread where a person was just going off on a stranger — completely unprovoked, fully unhinged, the kind of cruelty that only happens when you can't see the other person's face. And I wanted a username that would sit there quietly under every comment I made and ask the question that apparently needed asking. Subtly at first. Then very clearly.
It stuck with me because the internet didn't invent that impulse, it just made it frictionless. There's so much of it now. So much vitriol. So much anger that doesn't even know what it's angry at anymore. World leaders who aren't leading. Strangers who find validation in tearing other strangers down from behind a screen. And I kept coming back to the same thought: what if more people tried kindness? Not as a slogan. As an actual experiment. What if we at least tried to understand what broke for someone that made them do the awful thing they did?
That's not the same as forgiveness. I want to be clear about that. It's not "have you tried letting it go" or "have you tried being the bigger person." It's asking if you remember Horton Hears a Who. And the Lorax. "Every person's a person no matter how small." And "unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."
"Have You Tried Kindness" is doing a few things at once, and that's why it beat out everything else we considered.
Say it with genuine curiosity and it's a soft redirect. A pause. Wait — have you actually tried that? It's the question you ask yourself when your toddler is losing it in the grocery store and your first instinct is frustration. Have you tried kindness? Toward them. Toward yourself. Sometimes the answer is no, and just asking the question changes what you do next.
Say it with a slight edge and it's something else entirely. It's the thing your friend says when you've been spiraling for twenty minutes about some perceived slight from a coworker or customer service agent. It's tough love, but the kind that comes from someone who actually cares about you. Not mean. Just direct. Something that can cut through the noise.
Both readings are right. That's the point. The blog lives in that overlap — warm but not soft, kind but not naive, self-aware enough to know that sometimes kindness includes saying the uncomfortable thing.
As a frame, it goes everywhere. Your kid is melting down — have you tried kindness? A coworker is being impossible — have you tried it first? You're beating yourself up about a parenting decision you already made — have you tried kindness toward the person who made it? The answer isn't always yes. The blog doesn't pretend it is. But the question is always worth asking before you reach for the harder response.
Here's why I'm comfortable putting this name on everything we write, including the product reviews and the career posts and the stuff that doesn't seem like it's about kindness at all:
Because I'm not interested in performing warmth. I don't want a brand that sounds like a meditation app. The name works precisely because it sounds like something a real person says — someone who has tried kindness, found it useful more often than not, and wants to talk about it without being preachy.
The self-awareness built into the name is the whole defense against becoming content I'd roll my eyes at. The moment "Have You Tried Kindness" starts sounding like a bumper sticker instead of a real question, we've lost the thread.
So this is the commitment I'm making: every post on this site — whether it's about the best baby monitor or how to quit a job you hate or what to do when your marriage hits a rough patch — gets filtered through that question first. Not as a rule. As a habit. The kind of habit I could never build with a blank journal, but can build when I know someone might actually read it.
That's the blog. That's the name. That's why we're here.