What is Vonnegut's core moral teaching?

Kindness. Everything else is negotiable. He explicitly distrusts grand moral systems — they've been used to justify too many atrocities. But the individual act of treating the person in front of you with basic decency? That he trusts. It doesn't require a theory. It doesn't require God. It requires attention.

How does Vonnegut's war experience shape his view of kindness?

He witnessed the Dresden firebombing — one of the most destructive acts of World War II — from underground. He survived. When he came up, he found a world that had made this choice and moved on. His entire literary career is the effort to not move on — to insist that the people who died in Dresden were people, and that treating them as acceptable losses was wrong, and that the logic that allows such treatment requires examination.

What does Vonnegut teach about belonging?

That humans require it biologically. He frequently wrote about the breakdown of extended family structures in modern society — the isolation of the nuclear family, the loneliness of people without tribes. His prescription: build larger family structures voluntarily. "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

What did Vonnegut say about art?

"If you want to really hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be gay, go into the arts." Also: "Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow." He believed making art was valuable as an act, regardless of quality or audience. The making itself is the benefit.

What is Vonnegut's most important lesson for living?

Take care of the people near you. Don't wait for grand causes. Don't wait for certainty. "Farting around" — being present, paying attention, being kind to people you actually encounter — is the available life. It's also, he argues, the sufficient one.