A few weeks ago, Marilyn Devonish buttonholed a stranger to compliment her outfit. It was a natty, colour-matched mauve jacket and pumps, but that wasn’t the point. Dashing home from a shopping trip, Devonish had noticed the woman’s harried look and slow, defeated gait.
"The weight of the world was on her shoulders, but she was dressed in such a lovely way and I just had to tell her that," Devonish explains.
But the subject of her attention was taken aback. "Just minutes earlier she had caught her reflection in a shop window and told herself how bad she looked."
Devonish (54) is a stealth "angel of good deeds" who suffered depression into her early adulthood and sees it as her calling to bring some sunshine into fellow Britons’ days with a nice word about their shoes, hairstyle, jewellery or smile. Compliments bestowed, she melts back into the city streets, unnamed and untraceable.
Devonish, who also enjoys anonymously returning neighbours’ errant wheelie bins and holding doors open for strangers, says: "The point is not to be known for your good deeds – though, of course, I’m talking about them now – but to do a little something for someone else to make the world a slightly nicer place in that moment."
It’s a life philosophy which centres on radiating "human kindness and gratitude".
Voluntary giving – be it a donation to charity or a kind word or deed – is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to improve a giver’s own mood and wellbeing. Many scientific papers have shown it stimulates activity in brain regions associated with pleasure and reward, reduces physiological stress levels and leads, when giving becomes a habit, to long-term improvements in the life satisfaction of those who do good deeds.
In the past few years, though, a new breed of performative Samaritan has strode on to social media, toting wads of readies. They include Primenaz, a TikTok user who drops $20 bills at strangers’ feet and gifts his targets extra cash if they attempt to return them; and Sydney-based Tom, who films himself hovering behind unsuspecting shoppers at the till as he pays their checkout bills. It’s a broadcasted form of giving, which often features the street homeless as the unwitting recipients of money or gifts, that has attracted criticism for repositioning acts of kindness as a form of humanitarian drama.
However, a 2015 study found that we might want to refrain from becoming charitable braggards. The study looked into whether publicised or unpublicised donations to charitable causes lead to greater happiness and discovered that unpublicised gifts brought the bearer a 16% greater sense of happiness. The Beijing University researchers hypothesised that this boon comes from the fact that showy gifting makes a donor doubt their own motivations. Are we giving to others, for example, to enhance our reputation or to genuinely do good?
Vic Wood finds TikTok’s loadsamoney random kindness actors "a bit crass, to say the least". Wood (43) and based in Sussex, subscribes to the "pay it forward" philosophy – a moment that has its roots in early 20th-century America. Payitforwardism imagines that the happy recipient of a good deed will be prompted to go on and perform a good deed for a third other and so on in a global chain of kindness. The term was coined by southern anti-racist reformer Lily Hardy Hammond in her 1916 memoir In the Garden of Delight, as a comment on the inter-generational devotion parent figures exhibit towards their children: "I never repaid Great Aunt Letitia’s love to her, any more than she repaid her mother’s," she wrote. "You don’t pay love back, you pay it forward."
For Wood, who routinely leaves money for fares taped to bus stops and bunches of flowers accompanied by heartwarming notes on park benches around her Sussex village, secrecy is both the key to being a good Samaritan, and much of its art.
"I would love to pay for someone’s shopping by tapping my card on the payment machine, but it’s soooo hard not to be caught in the act," she says.
For Wood’s 40th birthday, she undertook to perform 40 anonymous good deeds in 40 days, encouraging her friends to do the same rather than buying her gifts.
"It was a lot of fun, but I really had to scratch my head to think of things," she recalls. She bought multiple cups of coffee for people behind her in cafe queues and money was stuck to bus stops across the country by Wood’s friends to commemorate her birthday.
"Even small gestures, I really recommend them," she says. "I don’t know how to explain it other than it makes my heart feel really full."
Early in her complimenting career, Devonish jumped into the sightline of a very smartly dressed man near to Great Portland St tube in London. "I thought, ‘Oh my God, he looks amazing with this three-piece suit, bright handkerchief and a dazzling tie, I just have to tell him!’" The beneficiary of Devonish’s effusive praise smiled graciously. "It turns out it was Ozwald Boateng," Devonish said. "He knew he looked damn good."
— The Guardian
