No, you shouldn’t always help other people.
I know… Shocking, isn’t it?
You’re not a camel to carry everyone’s baggage on your back. You’re a human being. Act like one.
Here’s your wake-up call.
If you’re new to this blog, know that my ideas are a bit out of the box. I know the consensus, when you speak of “helping others”, is to think of charity. So, am I against charity? Nope. That’s not what I will discuss here. I’m super in favour of charity, please help every cause you have money for!
So, forget the topic of charity for a second. Let’s instead talk about practical ways of helping others — especially the people you already know and have some kind of relationship with. I mean things like helping your aunt do the dishes, helping a friend through a breakup, helping your spouse find a job, etc. We’re empathetic beings, we want to be nice and help out… But should we always?
Obviously, no, we shouldn’t always. And I’m not just talking of “put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others”. We know it’s unwise, not to mention immature (yes, immature. Sleep on that one) to help others to our own detriment. I don’t think I need to repeat it.
There’s another context where it’s unwise to help others, however, and it has nothing to do with how healthy you’re feeling:
Do not help the people who aren’t ready to use your help.
I’ll give you a dumb example, but I want you to keep it in mind as you keep reading here: don’t help your toddler walk… If this toddler is walking on the roof! Chances are they don’t have the mental maturity OR the muscle strength to do it safely, will probably fall and get badly hurt. Instead, just remove them to safety.
As you can see with the dumb example above, (which is dumb because I’m pretty sure every parent is already aware of it and doesn’t need the advice — but it’s here for a reason, bear with me) if you break it down into five sentences, the first one will look like madness — “don’t help your toddler walk”. What? Why? — indeed, when you take it out of context, it sounds absurd. It’s the context (the place WHERE your toddler is walking) that matters most in deciding whether or not you should help them accomplish the activity.
Not every adult is mature.
We often forget (for a variety of reasons, but usually because of our egos) that age doesn’t always equal maturity. I’ll say more: someone could be perfectly mature for one thing (say, successfully being professional at work), but not very mature for other things (such as failing to respect people’s emotions in a more laid-back context). You could have a lot of financial maturity, but next to none in the context of relating to people, or vice-versa. You could be super mature as a parent, but not so mature in traffic or when discussing politics. The list goes on.
Some people will think, “well, but not all contexts are made equal! Traffic is very stressful!” — So is work, my dude. And house chores. And child-rearing. And shopping. And maintaining connections. Etc. When we think of one area of our lives as more or less stressful than the other ones, usually we’re operating from a place of bias. It’s not real. You’re just attached to a certain perception and you could just as well look at it from a different angle. Now… Just because it’s not real, I’m not saying it isn’t valid. Yes it is. You have your reasons for considering this one area stressful above average (welcome to the club! That’s me with connections), but I want you to keep in mind there’s subjectivity, and not objectivity, in your judgement.
In terms of maturity, your mileage may vary depending on the area of life (and person!) you’re talking about. I won’t dwell on the endless list of reasons why — which includes things like limiting beliefs, trauma, and just plain lack of practice — but I will remind you that you can’t simply take someone’s maturity for granted. Regardless of age group.
And since you can’t take anyone’s maturity for granted, you can’t mindlessly offer someone help in an area where you know they’re a bit childish. Or else, they’ll definitely “fall off the roof”, and you’ll be left scratching your head thinking “but why? I’m pretty sure I’m good at offering this kind of help, I instructed them well, I know the ins and outs of it…”
Okay, I won’t disagree. But YOU know how to use the help. The “toddler” you’re dealing with doesn’t.
(No, that’s not an invitation to start patronising that “toddler”. Give them space and time to grow at their own pace before you offer help again. Instead of, ya know, dictating the pace and the entire process of it like an arrogant control freak. Who do you think you are? God?).
I used to try helping people learn more about me when they disrespected me or acted immaturely towards me, because I was under the delusion that they’d “snap out of it” if they started to understand me better. This very blog is full of examples. Browse away. There are old articles where I dropped these little hints (often in a frustrated tone — but geared towards helping nonetheless) for people who I know wronged me in the past and happen to follow me here. The problem is… That was akin to helping a toddler accomplish something that is definitely a danger to themselves and others.
Love it or hate it, life carries this hard-to-swallow pill for the helpers and the helped alike: even the best communicator will be misunderstood by a person who just doesn’t want to listen. (Ya know, just like a bratty 5-year-old covering their ears and chanting La-La-La).
Some of these “toddlers” will say “but I did listen to this or that message of help”, but to that I say, no, you didn’t. You heard it… Then, you proceeded to distort it, cherrypick on it and discard the rest, delete the “stingy” bits, etc, to create a fictional version of it that your ego would like more… And in doing so, the helpful part of it got lost in translation. To summarise: what a waste of time!
It’s a bitter realisation…
…But it turns sweet eventually, with digestion.
Are you ashamed of taking? Of learning with the other, of simply sitting and listening? Does that make you feel… Inferior? Dominated? It’s a good idea to reflect about that.
A lot of people today hide their ego problems behind a facade of helper. Don’t they? It’s easy as a piece of cake, since we live in a society deeply influenced by Christianity. If you’re a native English speaker, Protestant Christianity (which is, arguably, even more repressive than the Catholic). Don’t you think there could be, perhaps, by chance… A bit of a baggage there? No? Oh, you’re somehow a mastermind capable of making fully conscious choices all the time? Come on. No you’re not. Admit it. There’s no shame in admitting you’ve been a victim of societal conditioning. We all are.
Ya know, in pagan Europe, people used to unapologetically aspire to power. Christianity came, and suddenly everyone became “humble”. Uh-huh. Sure. You pretend to tell the truth and I pretend to believe it. Here’s what REALLY happened: Christianity came, and people started hiding their ambition behind a mask that said “I’m just here to serve”, like a pastor herding sheep. That’s theatre, though. It’s not real. People are still people! We’re still as human as we were in pagan societies. We still lust for power, fame, and relevance just like our ancestors of yore. Sure, there are and there always have been exceptions, but they are and always have been few and far between. And no, I’m not talking about clergy. The clergy want power just like your average Joe… Until one of them doesn’t, and one of the average Joes doesn’t. One in a billion. Every god-only-knows how many years.
Long story short: if you have the impression that today EVERYONE is humble… Yeah, no, it’s just an impression. It’s a societal “to-do” thing, pretending to scoff at ambition (while secretly plotting how to gain this power you want in a socially acceptable way — such as telling everyone you’re “just here to help”).
Of course we should strive to be humble. I as a Buddhist couldn’t agree more! But let’s also be realistic because we shouldn’t forget that arrogance isn’t the only poison of the mind. There’s also ignorance. And ignorance includes turning a blind eye to your shadows or bypassing their integration because you’re too impatient to respect the process. Your own process. (Just like you don’t respect other people’s process and try to force it to accelerate when they already showed you they need more time. Ya know, we do onto others as we do to ourselves. As within, so without).
It may sound paradoxical, but in order to be truly humble, you also need to admit you have ambition. This is similar to how we should deal with other vices: strive for balance, not for the opposite extreme.
The more you repress, deny, demonise, and pour copious amounts of shame and guilt over any part of you because you’re afraid of it (because society conditioned you to be afraid of it), the more you’re inevitably going to feed it in the subconscious and cause it to come out in encumbered ways.
Re-read my initial reflection here. (First paragraph after the image above). People who are “ashamed of taking” are always fighting back against a fear of being dominated… Because they believe that teaching, or helping, or guiding others, or giving gifts corresponds to being hierarchically superior to them. So, by the same logic, if you receive gifts, or if you’re learning, being helped or guided BY others, that must mean THEY are dominating you.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Capitalism at its finest.
That’s also why some people think they’re “too cool for school”, FYI. “Oh no, the teachers are out to dominate us”, they think.
…And is any of that real? Well, no. Helping shouldn’t come with strings attached. It’s the immature that attach strings to it. (Yes, even if these strings do not come as a financial request or expectation of retribution. A lot of people THINK they’re freely giving, when in fact their “help” is providing them carte blanche to feel entitled to having power over people. That’s also a way of attaching strings to it, in case you didn’t notice).
A real helper doesn’t control.
A real helper doesn’t micromanage, exert power, intimidate OR play games of guilt-tripping and “agree with me or else I’ll paint you as the inferior person”. The people who do that are just pretending to be interested in helping, when in fact what they want is power. And they don’t just have a normal hunger for power, they want it all. They’ve been starving themselves of it for too long. Had they pursued it in small amounts throughout their lives, none of this would happen.
A lifetime of “don’t use ‘I’ sentences, that’s selfish”; “don’t stand out, attention-seeking is bad”; “don’t do this, people will think you’re selfish”; “don’t do that, it’s self-centered”; “don’t talk about yourself, only listen to others”, blah blah blah… Makes you eventually go for careers in “providing help” such as coaching, mental health, energy healing, and the entire healthcare industry. Why? To REALLY help those who need? Oh, no, not that. Just to… Ya know… Feel like there’s a mission to accomplish (which equals you’re “important and relevant”, perhaps? Which reminds you of the “I” sentences you couldn’t say, the flashy clothing you couldn’t wear, the spontaneous decisions you couldn’t take, the words stuck in your throat since childhood). That’s what repression does to you.
In fact, the act of giving genuine help is all about striving for the outcome… Not for the person’s submission. But that’s a little difficult in this society, ISN’T IT? The circumstances aren’t exactly favourable for genuine helpers to thrive and make themselves known. Best case scenario, they’ll get mistaken for this huge crowd of helper wannabes whose help comes with strings attached. And inevitably, people will fear these genuine helpers. Why wouldn’t they? I don’t blame them. It’s hard to believe in good things when they’re so rare that you’ve never seen them before.
What a “beautiful” world.
I mean… Just think about it for a second. If “receiving” [without giving back to be “even”] is soooooooo shameful, sooooo horrible, such an awful trap the person put you in… Why exactly be interested in helping others? Doesn’t your subconscious say, when you have that mindset, that you secretly want to dominate and entrap other people? It can’t be a double standard, you know. It works both ways. Everything works both ways. Shall I remind you of the Hermetic principle of correspondence again?
In a world where power games reign supreme, we need to first teach people how to help and how to be helped. Then, and only then, we can help and be helped.
If we just turn a blind eye to the environment we grew up in, its cultural roots, its problematic past and legacy, we become delusional. We start thinking all is fine, when in fact nothing is fine. Everything CAN be fine, eventually, as we progressively bid goodbye to this toxic baggage — but this must be done consciously by each and every one of us. Society certainly won’t facilitate it for us.
If we conveniently “forget” that Western civilization was built on the foundations laid by an Empire, fueled by slavery and conquest, we start thinking our current approach to helping others is “fine” when it’s anything but fine. It’s merely a reenactment of the social dynamics we inherited from plantations: the only valid roles are that of landlord and slave. The slave works, the landlord receives the fruit of this labour. That’s why socially a lot of people believe that unless you’re “performing” the role of a slave (regardless of race, today, by the way), toiling and suffering, sighing and lamenting the fact that “oh no, I need to work one day more, I’m so tired” [insert here your favourite “I hate Mondays” joke]… You must inevitably be a powerful landlord, because your ancestors taught you (subconsciously) that only the powerful landlords didn’t go through that kind of suffering. And today, we understand that slavery is bad, so we don’t want to feel like slave owners. But there’s no other valid role, other than slave or slave owner. So, what do we say? “Oh, now I’m the slave”. Working with something you love, because you love it, almost becomes a sin and makes you sound “unrelatable” (because you’re truly out of touch? No. Because society is rotten and people think they need slave morality).
Deniers will say it’s impossible because “I have circumstances against me”. Okay. That’s probably true. But did I say “work with what you love immediately, NOW, QUICK, HURRY UP?” No. I didn’t say any of that. You’ve been brainwashed to be immediatist and only want fast (and perfect! Instantly perfect) results or else you quit. That’s Capitalism lying to you, once again. We must work gradually, over the decades and generations, towards achieving what’s right. It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen without UNITING on a basic level (instead of in-fighting), either.
But people are, by and large, feeling hopeless. They’re like hamsters in a little cage, thinking there’s nothing beyond their bowl of food and exercise wheel — when in fact there’s a vast world out there. It’s just scary, but it’s there. The more we stay afraid, the more we will keep enabling inequality and injustice for the sake of instant gratification. Let’s just not?
You don’t need to change roles (from “slave owner” to “slave”) in order to find redemption for your community’s History. You need to change the entire motherfucking paradigm! You need to broaden your horizons and really say to yourself, “look. There’s more to the world of relating to each other than just slave and slave owner. In fact, this whole slavery thing was a big mistake we don’t need to keep going. Let’s create new labels now. Labels that empower EVERYONE equally”.
See how different that is, compared to “power corrupts” or “money is filthy” or your favourite disempowering popular saying that keeps you from advancing in life. What if we started thinking that, no, actually, power only USED TO corrupt. Money USED TO be filthy. BECAUSE OF History. But History exists so that we have a record of what works and what doesn’t. History doesn’t need to imprison anyone in an eternal loop of powerlessness.
Instead of powerless because we’re “small”, let’s be powerful together. Everyone. Why not? There’s enough for everyone. The world is abundant in possibilities and rewards, but to find that, we need to exit the cage we put OURSELVES in. If everyone knew that, we wouldn’t have billionaires today. They only exist because we buy into the narrative that what they sell is “the best” and “I could never develop anything that compares”. Bullshit. They’re not even doing a good job, they take more than they give back! They don’t have or want communities to care about, they just isolate themselves in their palaces. We have what they don’t. We can do better. Never underestimate the power of boycott combined with uniting to build our own future.
The outdated narrative keeps telling us only a few places in the world allow for prosperity, other ones are “shitholes”. Okay… So you’re leaving the so-called “shitholes” en masse and making it true. Because someone said it. You’re letting A RUMOUR control your narrative, for fuck sake! What if you didn’t? What if you fought for what’s yours and kicked the colonisers out? I know there’s inequality today, there’s generational trauma and all sorts of learned prejudice, there’s a plethora of problems we need to “swim upstream” against. Yes, indeed. But if we never start to do that, the circumstances will just get worse and worse. I know it’s tempting to just want what’s ready for you, what’s already out there because someone else built it — but that mindset doesn’t allow for the much needed change. Yes, it’s unfair. But there’s no fair option as of now. And there won’t be one organically as we cross our arms and just hope for a solution to fall from the sky. We need to work towards it unfortunately. Without perfectionism. And by the way, perfectionism is often just code for fear. “Oh, I’m afraid of pioneering anything, so I’ll find reasons why not, such as: nothing we kick-start is ever perfect from the get-go. Phew! The guilt is gone”. Yes, but the fear keeps paralysing you. So that excuse takes you nowhere. That’s not a win. That’s lame.
Do you want to be a slave to your fear? Do you want to be on your deathbed, regretting all the things you didn’t live, all the dreams you didn’t pursue and didn’t allow others to pursue either? All in the name of a fake narrative you were fed and never questioned, whereby “power corrupts”, so good things make people turn bad? I hope not. There are more possibilities than that in the Universe. Just because a few greedy pigs who HAPPEN to be well-off are selfish, it doesn’t imply causation. Don’t mistake your limited perception with reality, don’t be like a flat-Earther.
Learn to simply help. Without a hidden agenda.
Simply help those who need help — not those who asked for help but clearly don’t have the maturity to deal with it, or don’t know what’s best for themselves. Use your intuition to discern.
Simply help those who need help — without castrating, cutting their wings, dominating, making them “owe” you, any of that! Simply help. It’s not that complicated, in fact it’s simpler than these narratives. If you’re afraid of competition, you have a scarcity mentality. You don’t truly believe in limitless possbilities, you think the people you’re helping could end up doing the exact same thing as you and therefore replace you. Oh, yeah, sure, because they totally are you, they totally have your same life story, personality and mind? Wake up.
Simply help without expecting a reward — and by “reward”, I include success. Success is a reward. Stop pretending it isn’t. You could try helping and fail, it happens all the time. Let the failure sink in, and move the fuck on.
It’s a lesson that requires courage to go against the status quo. A lot of people will call you “a fool”, but they don’t know better, they’re programmed to say amen to everything the status quo feeds them… Like camels taking everyone’s baggage without questioning why. Dare to BE the glitch you want to see in the matrix — and this could lead us all to a better world.
