Giving For Yourself, Giving For Others |
October 16th, 2011 |
| ea |
When you engage in charity, there are two benefits: you get a warm
feeling inside and the people you help have their lives improved. The
confounding thing is, different charitable options have different
amounts of these benefits. Giving money (or a sandwich) to someone on
the street asking for food gives quite a bit of the former, but much
less of the latter. Donating to an international charity has very
little of the former, but a lot of the latter. Both are important. If
the people around you have lost their homes, you will probably be
compelled to help them. This is human. We help those around us. We
need to do this in order not to deplete our inner warmth. The tricky
thing is, doing things for the warm fuzzy feeling is doing things for
yourself. It's a very positive kind of selfishness. Real altruism is
doing what does the most good, regardless of how it makes you
feel. And we need this too. We need a lot of it.
(I originally wrote this as a comment on yesterday's post)
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