Feel-good news stories are hard to resist.

And why wouldn’t they be? The rest of the news is stressing us out. Political divides are deepening. The world is getting hotter. Ending, maybe.

So we all take comfort in stories about people being kind to one another. Like the one about the woman in Missouri who couldn’t get maternity leave, so her colleagues donated their own vacation days. Or the one about the young man in Alabama who spent hours walking to work, so his boss gave him a car.

Stories like these typically pop up on social media, where they spread quickly and catch the attention of news organizations and spread even farther. Some are attached to GoFundMe or other fund-raising accounts, so that strangers can donate to the beneficiary — or the benefactor. Others traffic in the alternative currency of smiley faces and heart emojis.

But lately, some critics have been pushing back on the whole genre.

Sweet stories like these, the critics say, hide an underlying rot. Individual acts of kindness don’t solve systemic problems — in fact, they can do harm by glossing over deeper issues.