Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
How often do you get to perform a notable good deed? Not just putting back a shopping cart, but something worthy of being a least a story about your day? Examples for scale:
A few months ago, I was hiking and happened upon a damsel in distress. A woman had fallen over and couldn't get up. She didn't seem seriously injured, more ungraceful and bruised, but she was struggling to get back up. I helped her to her feet and then escorted her back to the entrance to the park.
A few weeks ago, I was in a Walmart when I was stopped by a very short Hispanic man. He pointed up towards the top shelf and said, in an oddly Italian-sounding accent, "Can you please reach for me? I am too eh-small." I helped him, exchanged a quick pleasantry, and went on my day.
A few days ago, coming home from the same Walmart on an unlit back road, I nearly ruined my month. A tree had fallen across my half of the road. It was long dead and trimmed, leaving it like a telephone-pole sized spiked club. It was partially hidden by poor lighting, a curve, and a hill, and I came within a few feet of doing thousands of dollars of damage to my car. I managed to spot it in time, went around, and then I parked just past it, got out of the car, and hauled the tree out of the road.
With that act, it feels quite possible that I saved some nameless stranger from large expenses and hours of stress. I'll never know who, or if. But doing that felt good. Prosocial. Made me feel strong and competent.
But the real reward was getting to tell the story to my dad. I wound him up with expectations before revealing that I did not fuck up my car. And I got to see, when I mentioned picking up a tree and moving it, a flash of pride on his face at his son's casual might.
A flash of pride that I am reliving by telling the story now. And it occurs to me that this perk is probably a critical mechanism for inspiring people to do random, notable good deeds. And as a man who usually prefers his social invisibility, having one of these stories to tell is one of the rare times I'm happy to draw attention to myself. So.
What was your most recent good deed? Your greatest? And how does your willingness to preform them vary with how much social accolades you expect from people around you?
On Halloween I was coming home from the pub at maybe 10 or 11 pm when I happened on a girl who'd passed out on the street after having too much to drink. I immediately realised she needed to get to a hospital to have her stomach pumped, so I called an ambulance and put her on her side in case she was sick. Her two friends called me a pervert and accused me of groping her, then left, abandoning her to her fate. Because of the occasion, I had to wait somewhere in the region of three hours for an ambulance to arrive. At least some other passers-by stopped to help, including two nurses in training. A day or two later the girl texted me to thank me and said she was cutting ties with the two friends who'd abandoned her.
In July I went into my local cornershop, in which a customer was accusing the staff of short-changing him (I assume he was mistaken). He attempted to climb over the counter to assault them, whereupon I stepped in to put him in a half-nelson and drag him out of the shop. He feebly attempted to attack me before being dissuaded by his (I assume extremely embarrassed) girlfriend and slouching off in defeat. The staff were very grateful and made a point to thank me when I came into the shop over the following few days. Another patron came up to me immediately afterwards and quipped that I was in the wrong line of work and ought to become a bouncer.
A few weeks ago, my parents were flying back from Australia, and I offered to drive them home from the airport as I knew they'd be jet-lagged. When we got to the car, my mother, God love her, offered to drive. I very gently pointed out that the sole reason I was there was to save her the trouble of having to drive.
To be fair, I assume the main reason they took you up on the offer was to see you.
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Wow. This is one of those stories you don't believe if you read it on facebook, but I trust you. Terrible behavior.
They are so much worse in combination.
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Where does "good deed" end and "codependent sucker prone to being taken advantage of by friends" begin? I've struggled with the latter in life.
That aside, depending on if we're counting friends or just strangers the most recent one was either giving a friend a few hundred bucks to help with immigration paperwork (She's been here for over 30 years but has been stuck in some kafkaesque green card renewal Hell since Biden was in office.) or driving a drunk guy home from the bar I'm a regular at. The latter can turn into a shitshow if they're too belligerent to cooperate or too impaired to give directions but the man in question was just irritated that the bartender didn't want to let him drive, knew where he lived, and it was a short drive. I got a free shot for my trouble and was able to do the bartender (a dear friend of mine) an easy favor.
My greatest deed doubles as a hilariously over the top act of simping. A woman I was very much in love with at the time and who was also crashing on my couch wrecked her car driving to my place, clipped a parked vehicle and ripped one of the wheels off the car. She was just about to pay the thing off and I didn't have the heart to have it towed to her mom's place knowing it would never get fixed and she'd wind up back at the beginning of the "buy here, pay here" treadmill so I said "fuck it", had it towed to my place, and all but rebuilt the front end of her car over the next few weeks. In total I replaced both lower ball joints, tie rod ends, and sway bar links (What wasn't damaged was worn out junk anyway and the parts kit was cheaper than I expected so I just bought the kit.) along with one hub/knuckle assembly, CV axle, strut, and a fender badly spraypainted to match (The latter set of parts were sourced from a friendly local junkyard.). It wasn't perfect (The subframe was either bent or just badly out of alignment due to the wreck/repair.) but I got it to drive straight enough and the repairs lasted the rest of the car's life.
My take on helping people is that if I can I should, within reason. It took me a long time and a lot of money/free labor to learn the "within reason" part. It also took a long time to learn that doing nice things for people in hopes of being liked isn't going to fix not feeling particularly likeable.
I used to feel the same. I don't anymore, but I used to.
Amen. I never did it in the hope of being liked. I did it because I wasn't doing anything else with my time so why not pitch in. I stopped doing it because I reached the conclusion that doing nothing and losing nothing was preferable to helping people and ending up worse off, plus getting lined up to be volunteered to have the process repeat.
The last time I did a good deed worth talking about post resolution was when me and my gf at the time found a pair of debilitatingly intoxicated students in the park around midnight so I called a taxi and gave the driver £20 to take them home. They, a boy and a girl, were half naked and had just crawled out of a large water-filled ditch together. God knows what they'd been doing but it was clearly not working out and it was time to call it a night. When the taxi arrived the girl complained that she didn't want to share the taxi with the boy so I let her know that she could either deal with it or resume searching for her shoes. She wisely decided she'd deal with it.
In that instance I was pretty confident that I wouldn't become jaded from repeatedly encountering the same situation.
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I have been hermiting it up big time since getting back to Australia, and mowing my neighbour's lawn doesn't really count since I do it all the time, but I had the opportunity to do a good deed for someone the last day I was in Osaka - an old lady at the subway station dropped her umbrella and didn't realise it. She was so cute, like the platonic ideal of a little Japanese grandma, and she almost jumped out of her skin when I tapped her shoulder and she turned to see me looming over her. Then she double checked her bag like I was playing the old 'pretend someone dropped their umbrella and give them a second identical umbrella' prank on her. Then when she she realised I was being sincere she transformed from reserved and slightly suspicious to joyous gushing and appreciation, grabbing my arm and thanking me like I just pulled her off the tracks before a train arrived. The way people in Japan transform from mostly affectless to hyper animated when you break through the social conditioning is so much fun as an outsider.
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Drove my roommate to the airport and will be picking him up tonight. Wrote a training plan for a friend for the Baltimore marathon.
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Not terribly often, but sometimes. Just helped a friend move last weekend (though I did get some old books and a sweet radio that I will likely never use any more than he did). I've probably done bigger good deeds than this one but it sticks with me: I was staying at my aunt's place in a third-world country where she rents out flats. Some elderly regulars were visiting, and the man was in very poor health, clearly not going to be around to come back next year. One day I'm walking out of the vestibule as he's walking in, and he suddenly starts to collapse, I'm in arms reach to dart in and prop him up. He's a big, portly guy but I'm strong enough to hold him up, my brother gets in on the other side and we slowly walk him over to a stair where we can sit him down safely. At that age, in that poor health, and with the issues of the local hospitals, a bad fall would likely either have killed him or meant the end of his mobile life. There's also something particularly satisfying about being able to help somebody just by being there and being physically strong/quick, primal male stuff.
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I almost never do good deeds. This is my chief complaint about welfare statism. Virtue has been abdicated to the state- you can’t really be charitable because everyone is looked after. You can’t really be brave because everything is safe. Social atomization (arguably also a consequence of statism) makes it hard even to help someone move a couch because they don’t want to “bother you.” This makes practicing active virtues really had and makes real friendship really hard, because there is so little need for you to help anyone; friendship has been reduced to hanging out.
When life was harder, we needed each other a lot more. That doing one good deed makes us think of “accolades” is a sign of how weird the current situation is. I once got a call in the middle of the night to bring gas to a guy who had run out and I was SO happy. That was like 7 years ago. Ask people for more! Give them the chance to be virtuous!
Whereabouts do you live, if you don't mind my asking?
Western hemisphere.
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I suppose a perk of medicine is that I get in my good deed quota on a daily basis, while getting paid for it. I tried offering first aid to a lady lying in the middle of the street (and somehow also holding on to a wooden chair of unknown origin), but the local security shooed me away after confirming paramedics were enroute. I think she was drunk, concussed or both. I also hold open doors, and I gave a hot woman her expensive looking scarf back when it fell out of her bag.
(Her being hot had nothing to do with it, I'd have done it for anyone without an obvious, contagious dermatological illness)
Now that I note that you also asked about "greatest" good deeds, well, I did talk at least 3 people out of commiting suicide, outside of my capacity as a psychiatrist.
Yeah, as a doctor your day job is often going to qualify as "helping someone", at least by the prompt. Out of work examples would fit the bill, or times you went above and beyond for a patient, enough that you would want to brag about it to coworkers.
When I was a teenager, I suffered a bizarre injury to my eye. I had to take some kind of medicine to keep the pressure down, but I got the flu at the same time, and couldn't keep the medicine down. And the optomitrist who was taking care of me made freaking house calls. In his Porche, in the snow to come check on me, every day for a week, until he decided I needed surgery, and then he did the surgery.
It's been 25 years and my family still talks about the lengths that man went to to save my eye.
An optometrist helped diagnose me with an autoimmune disease. I had been having eye pain for a week or so, went to see a generalist who half-assedly assumed it was a bacterial conjunctivitis, prescribed me antibiotics which only made my eye feel worse. I looked for an emergency optometrist, the one that had appointments on shorter notice was in a small but fancy glasses store downtown. Went there, the optometrist checked my eye and she diagnosed it as a uveitis instead. Started me on steroid drops that helped, but then she asked me questions about stuff that seemed unrelated, like do I often get back pain. Is it at rest or from exercise that I get back pain. Indeed, I had been having back pain for years, that physiotherapist have been trying unsuccessfully to help me with.
Turns out having a uveitis was atypical at my age and in my condition, so she suspected there must have been more. She had me check with an ophtalmologist that specialises in uveitis, who then referred me to a rheumatologist and ayuup, I have ankylosing spondilitis.
Sure, the optometrist helped me by "merely" doing her job well, but to be honest she could have just treated the uveitis and I would never have thought that she had been negligent.
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I don’t know if this counts but I was really drunk with my buddy on the beach during a hurricane and we went swimming. The waves were literally on the walk way of the beach - he jumped in and immediately was flipped and went head first down disappeared. I vaguely sort of waddled in where I thought he may have been, grabbed him, and pulled him out.
He was sort of stunned and non verbal.
The issue is: I know something like this happened. But I don’t remember anything else before or after. I don’t know how heroic I was, and if my mind is remembering more and more heroic feats in that moment. It was some 20 years ago and we were drunk and it was way late at night.
But I do know that he got in the ocean and I had to get him. And if my mind is adding a bit of extra flair, so be it, I’m 6ft5 and it’s believable even to myself.
Also I was really stupid around that time so it all checks out.
Last year a lady kept fainting at a WWII reenactment and I was like the only person to grab her and put her on the ground gently and give her water. She was very fat and old and so was her husband. It was really good seeing my two teenage boys seeing me do that. Like, hey, you gotta do good things rather than staying neutral.
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