Why Are We Full of Good Intentions?
Good Intentions: The Emotional Backdrop
We live surrounded by good intentions. We encounter them in every corner of digital space, in every post, in every comment repeating the right phrase, the correct emoji, the precise concern.
Etymologically, intention comes from the Latin intendere meaning to stretch toward something. It does not refer to a passive state, but to a movement. In everyday use, however, good intentions are not about a will directed toward action, but a discursive manifestation of ethical desire: wanting the best, doing no harm, supporting a cause. In this hyperconnected modern way of life, intentions have largely been reduced to their mere proclamation.
The contemporary social imperative is clear: you must be informed, show you are present, that you empathize. This constant emotional vigilance is digitally channeled: we follow stories, react to posts, reply to messages. But this form of attention, apparently empathetic, does not entail real action. Its logic is akin to background music: always there, wrapping the scene, generating a uniform emotional climate, but without interrupting, demanding, or discomforting. Its role is decorative, an emotional background soundtrack.
This atmosphere of good intentions finds its most stable anchor in consumption. Not only do we post and share: we buy, we subscribe, we sign up. The market has skillfully translated affective values into products: self-care, helping, sharing, loving, empathizing—everything can be turned into a product, an app, a course, a monthly subscription. Intention becomes an object. And the gesture, emotional merchandise.
This is not a minor symptom: when the gesture is the only endpoint, when purchase is the only possible involvement, it ceases to be a threshold and becomes a border. No ambiguity, no uncertainty: a closed loop that protects the self from conflict, loss, or waiting. Displeasure is a cost no one wishes to bear; in its place is the comforting, immediate, emotionally secure experience. The problem is not the gesture’s existence, but when gesture is all there is, when it is naturalized as the only limit.
Breaking free from this logic—not resolving lack with a product, not posting empathy, not broadcasting outrage—means exposing yourself to others’ scrutiny, being seen as someone who “doesn’t self-care”, “doesn’t progress”, “doesn’t get involved”. The marketplace offers solutions for every discomfort, every anguish, every awkwardness: not buying, not consuming, not posting them feels almost like neglect. In this sense, non-consumption is a radical gesture: not for what it affirms, but for what it no longer sustains, for the lack left unpatched.
Thus, a good intention becomes an anxiolytic solution, a way to maintain ethical ideals without paying the price of real commitment. It becomes a symbolic suture to absence, to the gap between “wanting to be” and the risk of being involved.
Intentionality: The Cost of Committing to Possible Failure
But every true intention refers to intentionality: a real orientation of action toward something. Wanting is not enough; you must sustain movement, take a stand, take a risk. Intentionality demands involvement, decision, exposure, and perhaps, failure.
This is where the system short-circuits. When, after posting or subscribing, something more than the gesture is expected, when action is required, the contemporary subject faces a conflict. To act is to face uncertainty, delay, the possibility of failure. It means leaving the safe zone of the “ethical self” that wants, and engaging a subjectivity capable of making mistakes.
This directly clashes with the dominant discourse of the self as a unit of efficiency and personal care. The “look after yourself” narrative brooks no intrusion by the other—especially if the other is suffering, problematic, or unpredictable. Commitment means risking time, energy, identity—even emotional stability. It entails postponing rewards, tolerating doubt, living with discomfort.
Here lies the central contradiction: we want change, but without the price of failure. We want to act, but not if it means delay, ambiguity, or loss. Yet intentionality requires exactly that: sustaining uncertainty, facing the risk that our actions may not suffice, or may even go wrong. But that risk is what opens the possibility for true novelty: transformation requires going through it.
Intentionality confronts us with the real: not what we say we are, but what we actually are when we act, or more brutally, when we fail. There, the most feared core emerges: the possibility of failure, of falling short, of discovering we cannot be what we want, or that being it is not what we expected. Good intentions, on the other hand, shield the self from that confrontation. They keep us safe, afloat in the stability of “wanting to be,” always free of consequences.
That is their real trap: they anesthetize us to an invisible failure—that of doing nothing. But that failure doesn’t hurt, because it’s cushioned by social discourse: you posted, you tried, you bought it. You did the right thing. Everyone around you does the same. The environment returns a symbolic pat on the back: “it’s the intention that counts.” No one can fault you—except, perhaps, yourself.
Perhaps we are in an era that has perfected the art of saying without doing, of empathizing without engaging, of denouncing without changing. Good intentions serve as containment: they avoid the ethical rupture of admitting we won’t act. They let us go on without guilt, propped up by a system that turns inaction into a socially acceptable gesture, wrapped in praise, emojis, and automatic reactions. We have replaced difficult decisions with an endless stream of canned emotions.
If we do not regain intentionality—that capacity to act beyond the gesture—we risk living in a perpetual theater of predictable gestures and recycled emotions, where everything seems to matter, but nothing changes, where everyone wants the best, but no one is willing to pay its price.
To act is not simply to want. It is, above all, to maintain direction when the background music has faded, to keep interest alive without canned laughter, to endure uncertainty and difficulty without the automatic approval of an emoji or a like.