I’m already hesitant in thinking this will come off cunty. I don’t even know if I mean for it to, or if there’s just been enough examples back to back that feeling annoyed has had a chance to grow into mean sounding sentiments. I’m pretty-well sick of people “trying to help.”
My first observation with regard to helping is identification. If you don’t know the problem you can’t contemplate a fix. Many times we invent problems to alleviate boredom and protect our egos. “The flowers MUST get planted on Thursday or I’ll have to move my hair appointment!” I’ve seen situations as petty and simple as that blow up into a fight because someone stepped in to say they’d drive so the appointment could be kept or they’d volunteer to plant the flowers. Little did they know that comment has nothing to do with hair or flowers as the idea of having something to even live for has now been threatened! Gasp.
Much of the confusion simply boils down to having no appreciable grasp of other people. I’m sure there’s room somewhere in most things written about the folly of man how to get to hell with your intentions. In the vast majority of cases, it’s a totally justifiable confusion. Who the hell are we? Why do certain activities or friends or projects sound and feel so amazing right before they completely blow up? Why do we find ourselves incapable of maintaining a terribly positive or stable view of ourselves and place? Who’s trying to blame me for being as confused and lonely as the next person?
So our advice comes from self-help books we don’t admit to reading until later in life. It’s passed around in memes from celebrities or clips from an impassioned speech. We “like” and “heart” when someone has made a power claim of overcoming adversity or sticking it to some judgmental jerk who stared too long or made the wrong comment. We’ve built into our reflexive language, emoji and otherwise, the presumption of “help.” Upvote it. Share it. Express yourself and go viral. Put out good vibes. Connect your disembodied voice to the void and get sorted out.
Our conception of problems gets degraded. Some over-hyped dorm room of “influencers” makes a hashtag trend for a day or two and we get to routinely overuse the word “outrage.” The self-imposed problems of poverty and school debt wreak havoc as we muster the courage to stand up for a Gorilla longer than an entire race still routinely referred to as monkeys by a large portion of the population. We think it’s a problem to not get our brands launched or that our choices have become so blind and selfish our gut reaction to “the other” in any capacity is insecure xenophobic hatred, which one third to one half of many “developed” countries see no problem in at all.
It just feels like a giant liar’s game. I bring up often enough that no one wants to talk to me until they’ve reached some level of existential dread or desperation in their own life. I hope I’ve never relayed this as some kind of point of pride. It simply generally reinforces for me you’re either not really in my boat or you regard my efforts as fundamentally broken and in crisis and thus registering as the only time you can identify with them.
I watched a discussion about social justice warriors. One of the speakers said outright that these people who get angry and weepy about shit that makes them uncomfortable are simply immature and insincere. When you’re “outraged” on behalf of another race or culture when no one gives a shit about the costume until you threatened legal action. When you’re mind has opened so far it’s fallen out, unable to cope with mere criticism or even newly discovered facts that might poke at your conception of yourself. Because that’s always what it boils down to. How do you think about yourself? How deeply are those ideas rooted into your behaviors, or of more interest to me, what you choose to avoid?
It seems to me the truth is that we’re not helping, nearly ever. It’s a condition of existence that we’ll mostly not know about most things, and so even speaking on them as if we do muddies the water and tilts us towards eventual disaster. You care about sick or disabled people? Or you care about looking like you care about sick and disabled people? If I were to ever say I cared about sick and disabled people, it would be accompanied by a giant breakdown of the services we do and don’t offer, why, and what we should specifically do tomorrow to change our conception of sick and disabled people. So, right now, I don’t care about sick and disabled people, and to pretend otherwise is only going to get in their way. A more deliberate way to go about the same sentiment is to say I’ll certainly care when I become sick or disabled, so it behooves me to not let my heart bleed too fast or for too long without figuring out how to get my ass covered by a more comprehensive system and someone more qualified than me. Because I could call a number I saw on a lawn advertisement and be in your home in less than a week.
It seems like big dumb ego. I cross my fingers I’ll get a chance to persistently support and reshape the tools I think are necessary, but I’m not saving anyone. I’m no revolutionary. I’m assembling a puzzle. I’m rearranging pieces that were laid out before me into something I think will make a better picture. I’m not trying to help anything but my head. I listen long and hard to what keeps me up at night and keeps me writing blogs. I’m not even trying to help you. I simply want to see parallel examples of people growing, experiencing, and trying independent of intrusions from me.
Constantly “trying to help” is a recipe for resentment. Who’s going to believe you? How hard it was for you to say or do whatever it is you did. Who could possibly recognize the depths of your compassion and intelligence? Hey, we tried right!? Three cheers for indiscriminate failure as long as WE BELIEVED! It’s a giant trap. I fully expect myself at some point of getting sick of “starting over” as some 40-something 18 year old with a dream that I’ll sell off my shit and piss off to a moderate climate somewhere and focus on reading or music. That is as real as something I could ever believe as I do in the consequences of me getting my current path right. The only thing you could say I’m perpetually doing well is in owning and believing that fact. I’ll be okay regardless.
I’d prefer you were learning. I’d prefer you were striving. I’d prefer you were dreaming. Experiment. Talk. Budget. Stop trying. Stop acting like you know anything. Don’t feel destined to be anything more or less than you are in every beat of your words. Because you’re not helping. You’re certainly not helping me. I’ve known less than 10 even in the ballpark with any idea of what it looks like to help me. You don’t want to help and you don’t care, anymore than I’m going out tomorrow and reading a book to an old person in a bid to stave off their dementia just one more day. I want to hear your reasons why. I want to feel your compulsion to truth, not middle-income image masquerading.
