Well for a start you're not just thinking it, you're out here advocating for believing in the improbable fairy tale version of events as a valid coping mechanism, which is de facto advocating for negligence instead of people playing their part in converting a theoretical framework of right and wrong into reality.

And it is negligence, albeit a mild one. You're supposed to seethe a little bit when your bike gets stolen, and yes you're supposed to do something to stop seething about it. But that something's not supposed to be deluding yourself into thinking it ended up as little timmy's christmas present. You're supposed to ask why your bike was stolen with no consequence even though we as a society have agreed that theft is, in fact, wrong. You're supposed to think about what missing safeguards would have prevented that and advocate for their instatement, or if someone was negligent in their duty to already an already existing safeguard you give them a hard time about it. It won't bring your bike back, but you do it so the next guy's bike is just a little bit less likely to be stolen. Failing that you at least resolve to yourself to intervene if you ever think something fishy is going on with a bike, embarrassment be damned.

And I don't doubt you are thought of well in your community, and that that definitely does pay dividends. The most prosperous communities still tend to be the ones with a high level of sharing and collaboration. It's a real chicken and the egg situation there, collaboration leads to general prosperity, but it's also very easy to ignore little frictions and work together when everyone is already doing well for themselves. Eloquent avoidance and permissiveness is a tremendously safe and effective strategy for appearing good in those circumstances for little actual cost, the more superficial the community interactions are the greater the cost/benefit outcomes become. You can prove you're good to ten people through direct individual interactions, or you can just do one good thing and make sure to bring it up a hundred people who aren't really paying much attention to your day to day life about it, but have enough resources to throw a little something your way anyway. Appearing good in those circumstances is a social capital that is ripe for conversion into real capital with minimal effort, that's the essence of the empty virtue signalling grift. But appearing good and doing good are very much decoupled in a superficial community, appearing good is a social game to which actually doing good is a sub-optimal strategy for being so inefficient.

It's not like our forefathers wouldn't also feel sympathy for the security guard who just forgot to lock the gate, they just knew that if they chewed him out about it anyway he's still more likely to remember next time than if they just quietly let it slide. Sometimes you have to look like the bad guy superficially and burn some social capital sometimes to do actual good things long term. But somehow the majority of people with generally good intentions have become so gelded politically that they don't even think they can make hard decisions or initiate any conflict without making things worse instead of better.

The cumulative effect of years of proverbial bike cuckoldry has left all the real decision making to an insular elite with no such compunctions about wanting to be good handicapping their will to power. And have left a prosperous and oft well meaning middle class of naive socialites on the precipice of collapsing into a lower class who now either hates them because they were once richer, or hates them for effectively being highly competent freeloaders, benefitting maximally from society's stability and contributing minimally to protecting it, all whilst subjecting them to the whims of their silly social games. On an individual level it can make for a lovely to person to know, which makes it all the more of a shame that on a societal level it feels like watching cute and fluffy lemmings waving to the predators below as the cliff edge is beging to crack and someone is making off with all their nest eggs.