The un-examined life

As you read this, you probably consider yourself to be a good person.

But here is a fact. You are probably a bigger douchebag than you'd like to admit.

Think about your life, think of the good things that you've done.

Now take money out of the equation. Don't count the times you gave to charity, don't count the time that you paid for your friend's dinner. Don't count the time you gave your friend a ride somewhere.

Those are things you did with money. Money is a relative qualifier, a millionaire has plenty of money to be generous with, a beggar has very little to be generous with. The only way we could equally value good deeds that involve money is it we consider it as a percentage of your total income, minus the amount of money you need to survive.

If we do that, suddenly the millionaire donating $10,000 to charity doesn't seem like much when it's like 1% of his total income.

Money makes charity and kindness hard to judge, so we're discounting it from this test. We're judging you, not your money.

Now, without money, what good things have you done for people?

Not as much now I'd wager.
Now you need to look for moments of selflessness. Introducing your friend to his future wife, despite you being single yourself? That is a charitable act.

Spending all night helping a friend or relative deal with an emotional problem despite have much "better" things to do? Damn right that counts.

Ok, we're all probably feeling a bit better about ourselves now. We can all name a few instances where we were really shining examples of humanity.

But now come the bad part, now we weigh our sins.

Count all of the times you were a bastard to someone. Every time you fucked someone over for your own gain or just for the lulz.

Now add in the minor fuckery. The times that you got two slices of pizza when everyone else only got one. The times when you cut off that other driver because you didn't feel like letting them pass you.

So you now have a small pile of selfless acts, and a shit-ton of selfish acts.


Now, what does this mean?

It means you're human. Selfish acts is your nature looking out for yourself. You taking the extra pizza was you making sure you had enough to eat. When you stole your friend's girlfriend, you were attempting to preserve your own genes over those of your friend.
But the moments of charity and kindness? Those are you attempting to preserve the human species. We exist as individuals because we look out for ourselves, we exist as a species because we actually want to help other people when it counts. This is the same drive that causes someone to dive onto a grenade to save his friends. (along with enormous brass balls).

We're all fuckheads, but we're not entirely without merit. We have to have both.

Someone who only cared for themselves would be a sociopath. Completely without care for the rest of humanity.
Someone who only cared for everyone else would starve to death because they don't think to take care of themselves.

To be human, you need both qualities. The Bastard and the Saint.

Don't dwell on it, just try to be less of a bastard when you have no possible gain from the situation and try to help people more when you can. Start with those you care about. It'll make the acts much easier to come by. Giving money to the poor is one thing, but can you imagine yourself spending days of your life physically cleaning up a homeless guy and helping him work through his problems?
Probably not. Start with the people you already care about.