Show Up Anyway

What mangroves and a massive study can teach us about showing up for each other

A few days ago, we were on the brink of a wider war. The news was doing what the news does: compressing the world into a scroll of dread. I felt it deeply, and was worried about the future of the world. Then a ceasefire came through, and I exhaled in a way that told me I’d been holding my breath for longer than I realized. Not to say this is over, I very much doubt it is, but it still gave me a brief respite from fear.

That next morning, I heard an entirely different story on NPR about mangrove trees in Cambodia. You see, for decades, these coastal villages had watched their fisheries collapse. The mangroves that sheltered young fish had been cut down for charcoal in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge, and without them, there was nothing left to catch. People left. Communities shrank.

Photo by Adam Gilley on Unsplash

What turned it around wasn’t a policy mandate or a massive infusion of aid. It was something much simpler and arguably much more powerful; people going door to door, explaining to their neighbors what the mangroves actually did. The trees feed the fish. The fish feed you. If the trees go, so does your livelihood. Once people understood that invisible connection, they started replanting. Two decades later, the fishery is thriving and the trees are growing.

I’ve been thinking about that story since then, because it maps so precisely onto something I’ve been reading about much closer to home.

Researchers at Stanford recently published a study in Nature Human Behaviour that tracked more than 5,000 undergraduates over two years. They were trying to understand why so many young people feel isolated even when they’re surrounded by people who genuinely care about them.

What they found is deceptively simple. People systematically underestimate how empathic the people around them actually are. The researchers call it the “empathy perception gap.” Students estimated their peers were about 24 percent less empathic than those peers reported themselves to be. When asked whether fellow students would help someone who was feeling down, participants guessed around 87 percent would. The actual number, based on aggregated self-reports, was closer to 96 percent.

I was quite surprised by these results because this gap matters more than it sounds. Students who perceived their peers as less caring were less likely to take what the researchers call “social risks,” things like starting a conversation with someone they didn’t know, sharing something vulnerable with a friend, or showing up to a gathering alone. Over time, those students became lonelier. Not because no one cared about them, but because they didn’t believe anyone did.

Wow. Just think about that for a second.

The researchers describe this as a vicious cycle. You assume people won’t show up for you, so you don’t reach out. Because you don’t reach out, you never get the evidence that you’re wrong. Your isolation confirms the story you were already telling yourself.

This is the part that gets me. We talk a lot in mental health about access to care, about funding, about clinical interventions. All of that matters enormously. But this research points to something more elemental. The social infrastructure that protects mental health, the friendships and the small acts of showing up, is already there for a lot of people. They just can’t see it. Or don’t believe it’s there when it really is.

It’s the mangroves. The root system is underwater. You don’t know it’s feeding everything around you unless someone makes it visible.

The Stanford team didn’t stop at documenting the problem. They ran two field experiments with first-year students, the population most vulnerable to loneliness during a major life transition. In one, they put up posters in dorms with real data about how empathic students actually reported themselves to be. In another, they sent smartphone nudges encouraging small social risks: compliment someone you don’t know, ask a friend to grab coffee, tell a friend what you appreciate about them.

The results were also super interesting. Students who received the intervention were nearly twice as likely to sign up for a social event with strangers. They reported taking more social risks even after the nudges stopped. And months later, they had measurably more close friendships than students in the control group.

Photo by Shoeib Abolhassani on Unsplash

I had to reread this section. They didn’t teach social skills. They didn’t provide therapy. They showed people data about each other and encouraged them to act on it. That was enough to reshape social networks months down the line. The intervention was showing people that what they may not have thought was true, was actually true.

I keep coming back to the NPR story because the mechanism is the same. The mangroves were there, or could be there, but people couldn’t see what they did. Once someone made the invisible visible, behavior changed. Not through coercion or top-down policy, but through shared understanding.

We are living through a period where it’s very easy to believe the worst about each other. Doomscroll, take me away. And the research confirms what you’d expect: people with higher anxiety, depression, and loneliness tend to have wider empathy perception gaps. They don’t see it as easy. The people who most need support are the ones least likely to believe it’s available.

But here’s what I find hopeful, genuinely hopeful, in a week where hope felt hard to come by. The gap is not a fixed trait. It’s a misperception, and misperceptions can be corrected. The Stanford interventions were posters and text messages. They were cheap, scalable, and they worked.

What if we told a different story? Not a dishonest one. One grounded in data. One that says: the people around you are more willing to help than you think. The door is less closed than it looks. The roots are in the water, feeding everything, even when you can’t see them.

I don’t think this is naive. Based on this article, there’s evidence there to support it. And it’s the kind of intervention that doesn’t require a clinical referral or a line item in a budget. It requires showing up, and believing that showing up matters.

The mangroves are already growing, we just need to help people see them.