“Altruism”

I have been attending therapy recently in a bid to betterise my mental health a little, but primarily to try and make my symptoms of unmedicated ADHD in every day life much more manageable. Therapy has been enlightening, but there’s a fundamental question I keep finding myself asking which I think really just underpins a lot of emotional intelligence and regular intelligence. Maybe some of you do it unconsciously, and maybe some of you have never really asked it; but it’s worth consciously putting this word into your head occasionally.

I was at a Magic The Gathering night at a local game store, and there’s a chap there who’s struggling to pay for something. I overhear the conversation from across the room and just go over and pay for it for him. He was grateful, and I just went and sat back down and didn’t really say a lot. It seemed like a good thing to do for someone and he was very greatful, and it clearly made his day.

Anyway, I didn’t think much of it until I was discussing this at my therapy session and found myself asking “why did I do that?”. Yes, it’s kind… but I found myself simplifying the question of “Why did I do that” to “Why do we do kind things?” — Is it for the betterment of others, or is it really for the betterment of myself?

I wondered, do people really do anything unless they’re getting something out of it?

Does Altruism really exist in any real sense?

People donate to charity for a sense of pleasure or satisfaction out of doing it. People donate things to charity shops because they want to get rid of their junk, or get pleasure out of knowing donating things can be put to use by someone else. If we took no positive feelings from doing kind things, personally I don’t think we’d do them. Which made me ask “What did I gain out of that interaction?”

I found that one of the functional answers — that is to say, less of a philosophical rummination, and more of an actual answer — to this question is that I try to build charge on a sort of Social Battery. I can be quite “intense” sometimes — Lots of talking, lots of opinions that I feel excited about that others might not, not a lot of patience sometimes, and quite a lot of fidgeting. Though my therapist will tell me off for not prefacing this conversation with “I feel…”: That can make me quite unlikeable over the long term. I therefore, albeit unconsciously, follow some basic rules for living that allow me to build this perception of being a good person (because I am, I think), so that when I am being unlikeable in some scenarios, people are more forgiving and my symptoms doesn’t ruin my friendships.