Tiny Kindnesses on Threads collects brief firsthand accounts of small acts of kindness that stayed with recipients. The collected stories are heartfelt, sometimes mournful, and often joyous, offering emotional balm during busy and stressful times. Crunch periods force employees to cram work into short spans and are often praised as badges of honor despite causing severe physical and mental harms. Research links crunch culture in tech and video game industries to pain, medical distress, and worsening mental health. Reporting in 2024 connects crunch to declines in creativity and skill development. The phrase "You cannot create access for others without creating access for yourself" frames the need for self-access and support.
The account is a storytelling project on Threads called Tiny Kindnesses. Those interested are asked to submit a small kindness that someone did for them that stuck. The stories are heartfelt, sometimes mournful, often joyous. They are examples of what we can lean on when structures fail us, or when we're slipping swiftly towards the cracks that are so easy to fall through. It strikes me that, during crunch periods, it's these little pieces of kindness, often towards ourselves, that get lost or ignored. Easy enough to make a joke about late stage capitalism here, but let's just start with the research-backed reality.
Crunch periods are where employees are forced to cram work into short periods of time. Historically, people have been praised for their performances during these periods, as if severe overwhelm is a badge of honor, but at what cost? A heavy one, as it turns out. Throughout the tech sector, crunch has long been connected with , pain, and severe medical distress. A 2022 presentation at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences found that crunch culture and its impact on mental health is part of the fabric of the video game industry's culture. In April 2024, David Howell wrote for this very website about how crunch isn't just bad for workers, it's bad for their creativity and skill development.
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