The Patience of Mercy

Temporal Generosity and Why Real Grace Takes Time

A few weeks ago, my group chats and DMs started filling up with conversations about Ocean Vuong's new book. People were sending me quotes, screenshots, links to readings. The kind of flurry that only happens when someone's words hit a nerve in the collective. So naturally, I went down a rabbit hole.

I started watching every talk he'd given lately, letting them play in the background as I cooked or cleaned or tried to write. And then, in one of those conversations with Jia Tolentino Ocean said something that I didn't fully understand at first, which meant it made me pause.

"Mercy is kind of the opposite of YOLO." — Ocean Vuong

I stopped the video. It sounded beautiful, sure—but I couldn't quite make the leap. Still, I wrote it down. Because when Ocean Vuong says something, there's usually something to wrestle with. And this one? It's been quietly working on me ever since.

To understand what Ocean meant, I found myself asking: what is mercy, really?

Mercy is the choice to respond to harm with something other than more harm. It's recognizing that someone has hurt others or themselves, and instead of asking 'what do they deserve?' asking 'what does healing look like here?' It's seeing beyond someone's worst moment and choosing curiosity over condemnation.

Of course, I have no idea if this is what Ocean actually meant—I'm reading my own hunger for grace into his words. But it's what his observation opened up for me.

But mercy is more than individual acts of forgiveness. It's a way of moving through the world that assumes people are larger than their failures, that redemption remains possible, that time is not a scarce resource to be hoarded but something we can afford to give.

The word itself tells a story. "Mercy" comes from the Latin merces—originally meaning wages, payment, the price of goods. Ancient Romans understood it as pure transaction. But early Christians transformed it into something sacred: the spiritual reward for showing kindness where only cruelty was expected. They took a word about the marketplace and made it about grace.

What strikes me is how that transformation mirrors what mercy asks of us now—to move beyond the logic of exchange, beyond what is earned or owed, into something that transcends transaction entirely.

The more I sat with Ocean's words, the more they started to unfold—not in a neat, logical way, but in the way certain truths do, seeping in slowly through lived experience rather than explanation.

YOLO—you only live once—has become shorthand for urgency, for indulgence, for the chase. It's the whisper behind late-night texts and impulse buys and burnout culture: take what you can, now, before it's too late. It's American individualism distilled into three letters—the mythology that life is about maximizing personal experience before time runs out.

There's something almost violent in YOLO's self-assertion. It moves fast, assumes scarcity, tells us to grab what we can while we can. It's deeply transactional—even in its rebellion against conventional wisdom, it's still about getting yours.

Mercy, though? Mercy moves entirely differently.

Where YOLO rushes, mercy pauses. Where YOLO grabs, mercy offers space. Where YOLO assumes scarcity—of time, of opportunity, of love—mercy assumes abundance. Not abundance of things, but abundance of possibility. Of transformation. Of tomorrow.

Mercy only makes sense if you're playing the long game. Or rather, the infinite game. It requires what I've started thinking of as temporal generosity—the radical belief that we have time. Time for people to change. Time for healing. Time for the slow work of becoming.

In America, we've largely lost both the language and the practice of mercy. Our justice system is built on punishment rather than restoration. Our economy rewards those who capitalize on others' weaknesses. Even our personal relationships often operate on principles of efficiency and mutual benefit rather than the kind of radical acceptance that mercy requires.

We live in a culture addicted to speed and judgment, where someone's worst moment becomes their permanent identity, where failure is met with cancellation rather than the possibility of repair. We've created systems that excel at determining who deserves what, but we've forgotten how to extend grace to those who deserve nothing.

And here's where abolitionist thought has taught me to think more clearly about mercy.

Because in carceral systems, mercy is often framed as a privilege—a momentary exception granted from on high, only to those deemed worthy. It's conditional, paternalistic, and still rooted in the logic of punishment. But abolitionists like Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore remind us: mercy is not justice. Abolition isn't about better punishments or kinder cages. It's about transforming the very systems that make punishment feel inevitable in the first place.

Rather than relying on mercy as a gift to be bestowed, abolition centers care, accountability, and healing. It moves beyond one-sided forgiveness and into shared responsibility. As adrienne maree brown writes, it's about "emergent strategy"—small actions that transform complex systems from the inside out. It says: we don't need mercy handed down—we need the conditions that make traditional mercy obsolete. A world where dignity isn't up for debate. Where harm is addressed through connection, not isolation. Where people aren't disposable.

Angela Davis asks us to imagine "freedom as a constant struggle"—not a destination but a practice. And maybe that's what mercy becomes when filtered through abolitionist thought: not leniency, but love. Active, rigorous, and rooted in transformation. Not something we wait to be granted, but something we offer each other daily.

This kind of mercy asks harder questions: How do we address harm without reproducing it? How do we hold people accountable while still believing in their capacity to change? How do we build systems that assume redemption is possible?

Abolition invites us to practice mercy not as individual charity, but as collective responsibility—a slow, daily commitment to seeing each other as more than our worst moment, to creating conditions where everyone can heal and grow.

Lately, I've been wondering what it would look like to build a life around this understanding of mercy. To practice it not just outwardly, but inwardly. To meet my own failures with the same compassion I hope to show others. To hold my past selves with patience instead of judgment.

The person I withhold mercy from most is myself. I am quick to judge my own failures, slow to forgive my own mistakes. I live in constant negotiation with who I think I should be versus who I actually am. The voice in my head speaks in YOLO's urgency: fix this now, be better immediately, optimize yourself before it's too late.

But what if I practiced the kind of mercy that abolitionists envision? Not the conditional mercy that requires me to prove my worth, but the kind that assumes my inherent dignity. Not mercy as an exception to my self-criticism, but mercy as the foundation from which I operate.

This feels like revolutionary work in a culture that profits from our self-hatred, that tells us we're never enough as we are. Extending mercy to ourselves—staying present with our current struggles instead of fleeing into performance or perfectionism—might be one of the most radical things we can do.

So maybe Ocean's words aren't a one-liner but an invitation into a different way of being. A way to ask: what if we made mercy a daily practice? What if we moved through the world with the kind of patient love that assumes transformation is always possible?

What if mercy—unhurried, generous, rooted in collective care rather than individual charity—was our quiet rebellion against a world that tells us there's never enough time for grace?

I think about Octavia Butler's words: "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you." Mercy works like this—it transforms both the giver and receiver, creates new possibilities, opens pathways that punishment closes off.

In choosing mercy over speed, patience over judgment, care over punishment, we're not just being kind. We're participating in what Kaba calls "the long arc of collective healing." We're betting on a future where everyone gets to be more than their worst day. Where systems serve healing rather than harm. Where dignity isn't earned but assumed.

We're choosing to believe that we have time—time for people to change, time for healing, time for the slow work of building a world where mercy isn't exceptional but ordinary. Where love isn't scarce but abundant.

Maybe this is what Ocean was gesturing toward—not just living like we have one life to seize, but living like we're part of something larger. A story of repair that continues with or without us, one we're responsible to even if we'll never see how it ends.

Maybe that's what mercy teaches us in the end: that we have time. That people contain multitudes beyond what we can see. That healing happens on timescales longer than individual lifetimes.

And in a world addicted to urgency, choosing to believe in that slow holiness might be the most necessary thing we can do.