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Is it just me? Or is there actually something coming apart out there in the way we treat each other? I’m worried it’s a sign of a deep shifting, like a tectonic plate about to give way. Let me explain.

I was at the gym the other day, where I’ve been a member for a couple of decades. It is a large public facility with a basketball court, multiple racquet courts, various studios and a pool area with a hot tub. It has been mostly taken over by pickleball players, but I still enjoy it.

This gym has always been a friendly, clean and relaxing oasis in my life. I go there to work out and stay in shape, to play squash, to lift a few weights, to sit in the steam room once in a while. It’s a cherished part of my routine. I always leave feeling better about myself and the world.

Well, almost always.

Lately, things are shifting. I will not describe the intimate new body grooming rituals I see in the gym showers. The lack of discretion and awareness of others is troubling. (You really shave there?)

My gym’s steam room has a sign on the door instructing users to check with others prior to blasting the steam. A few months ago, I was there enjoying a meditative few minutes of heat and peace. Then a guy came in and, without asking, pressed the button for more steam, jabbing at it as if in accusation. Within seconds, the steam and heat were unbearable. As I got up to leave, I mentioned that it was too hot for me, and I referenced the sign on the door. He peered at me through the haze and said, and I quote, “It’s a steam room, you moron. It’s supposed to have steam.”

Luckily (for me, not him; he was quite muscular) the volcanic temperature forced me out before further confrontation. But a few minutes later, as I was towelling off, he came out of the steam room and gave me a dirty look. I said nothing, just pointed at the sign on the steam room door. “Who made you the king of the steam room?” he demanded. Embracing my inner equilibrium, I said nothing. Of course, we were both completely naked and there didn’t seem to be any dignity ahead, no matter which way it went.

After exiting the locker room, I passed through a public area with common tables and chairs. I often see kids working on their homework or a parent reading a book or families eating lunch. A young man had just sat down at a table and, as I was walking towards him, he took off his shoes. He’d been outside and they were covered in mud and dirt. He proceeded to place his filthy footwear on the table, covering it in mud! He took his socks off, stood up, grabbed his shoes and left, leaving the table unusable. Still traumatized by the Battle at Steamy Crossing, I said nothing and pushed on.

Once home, back at my desk and working, I sent a few emails, read a couple that had come in and took stock of a few projects and ideas. That was when it hit me that there’s another vein of disrespect now coursing through our world: a breakdown in common courtesy around communication. And I don’t mean actual words and phrases, though that’s an issue, too. No, I mean simply showing the respect of replying to people.

In the last year or so, I’ve had some frustrating strings of communication with peers in my professional orbit. One of them I know well enough to be cordial with, the other I have known for many years and we have had a friendly professional relationship. I have delivered various assignments and provided one or two award-winning articles. And I’ve only ever reached out when necessary — I am not a burdensome or frivolous communicator.

In both cases, I’d been waiting months for a response to story pitches. I followed up here and there but eventually gave up. To be clear, it wasn’t about getting an answer I didn’t like, it was getting no reply. In this business, story ideas are like dishes on a menu, some you pick, some you don’t. In times past, it would be entirely uneventful for someone to take approximately 15 seconds to write a quick note saying, “Thanks, but we’ll pass on this one. Keep ’em coming!”

Actually, it only took me nine seconds to type that.

Let me make the case for why this kind of thing matters. I was raised by thoughtful and polite parents. Sure, they sometimes lost their cool, as any parent does, but they made me understand that small gestures are reflections of a wider picture, that courtesy was usually a reliable indicator of decency. There are exceptions, but it’s a thread of information in a larger fabric that tells you something about who you’re dealing with.

Am I perfect? No. (Well, I am, but I must maintain the illusion of humility for the purposes of this column.) I forget things. I make mistakes. I get self-absorbed. None of us is immune to lapses in judgment. But it’s not the one-offs that are the problem, it’s the patterns that are worrying, the threads creating the tapestry. Are we too distracted to be kind? Or is it something deeper, harder to overcome? A broader coarsening of human relations. A binary political culture turning us into adversaries. A numbing of empathy because most of what we absorb is through a flat screen; social media is partly to blame, with its inauthentic connectivity and hollow communication.

It seems this epidemic signifies a bigger problem: our dwindling sense of obligation to one another, which is not a debt owed but a responsibility to treat each other with respect. And it is a responsibility, not an option. If we forgo that, well, we might as well go all Walking Dead right now instead of dragging out our inevitable extinction over the next couple hundred thousand years.

The real question isn’t whether we are going through an epidemic of discourtesy (we are), but what to do about it. My previous strategy of subtle opposition hasn’t worked, so I’ve adopted a new strategy: to build my own muscles of politeness. More than taking the high road, I now genuinely thank others I meet along the way. When someone responds immediately to an email or phone query, I thank them for their promptness. When someone lets me merge in traffic, I wave acknowledgment. When someone in the steam room asks if I mind more steam, I thank them for asking.

It’s not all bad out there, either. I was dealing with a service desk specialist for my home internet a few weeks back. This person said he’d call back a week later to make sure the problem had resolved. 

OK, whatever, I thought. 

Exactly one week later, he called to ask if everything was in order. I said it was, thanked him, hung up and immediately contacted the provider and sent a note of commendation, naming the employee. I needed a source for a story I’ve been working on, but couldn’t find one. I contacted a well-known person utterly out of the blue, a pure flier. She responded right away and said she’d be happy to help. I sent her a note of thanks.

What has been quite enlightening these last six months or so is that every time I go out of my way to thank someone for even the smallest considerate gesture, the response I get is a mix of surprise and benevolence. People are, for the most part, pretty decent and aren’t discourteous on purpose. It turns out that showing consideration for others is a bit like going to the gym — easy to neglect but worth the effort. And the best thing about it is that getting ourselves into kindness-shape isn’t nearly as hard as bench-pressing a bar of weights. Trust me on that one.