I don't like helping people.
I wasn't sure how to start, but this thought crossed my head, so wah-lah. Today I was dropped off as a neighbor who recently had surgery on her arm was leaving her apartment. She, half jokingly, asked if either me or Byron wanted to go get drugs with her. She's been on some pretty high dose pain medications, and it's unclear that they had worn off enough for her to drive safely. I, as a not psychopath, offered to driver her to the CVS.
What I take to be a result of a mild trip the day before was a sense of...nothing. It wasn't a “I don't care” kind of nothing. It wasn't a “nothing matters” kind of nothing. I wasn't hollowed out or secretly and desperately wishing my better angel didn't get the best of me. I just drove her and we talked about coffee. We discussed the looming crisis of many more older people like her in bad situations which make getting taken care of difficult.
I do like the idea that people can get the help they need. I like the idea that I might be able to contribute to that effort. I like to think there's something in place that will support me when I need it. I, and the rest of western civilization save my country's insanity, think get it in the same way. I don't want people like me desperate for a job to be in social work or home health care. I don't want to watch people struggle with what any of us would reflexively do for each other, but for the cultural fog or monetary incentives.
To be able to say something easy like the last paragraph, I had to start with something, presumably, difficult. I don't mean I felt a particular way about saying I don't' like helping people. I mean I don't know why that felt like the provocative thought. I don't know what I mean by it. I like knowing I don't have some kind of irresponsible and irrepressible malicious intent that prevents me from functioning in the world. I like helping those who've I've personally discerned reasons for justifying my help. But who am I? Why should it matter what my fickle and small ego has to say about what constitutes help and who deserves it?
If nothing else, I'm a person who's readily admitting that he doesn't like to help, even while he is, even while he's prepared to do so again. My contentious and contradictory spirit is a process. It's the work of figuring out “if there's a there there” when I think or say something difficult.
I just got done watching a debate on the value of “political correctness.” The loudest message I took away was about how oppressed the people who were defending political correctness felt. Their takeaway message was to plead with you to feel as desperate as them. Their method of discourse was to avoid definition, project language and insecurities, and to play victim. I don't want to help people who conduct themselves like that.
It seems to me that if you're going to help yourself to a stage and decide your words need to resonate to thousands or millions, they almost shouldn't be your words. That is to say, what do you know? A few emotionally compelling anecdotes almost certainly bias you to some form of rhetorical style or emotionally shielded posture. What does your message look like when it's not about you probing for laughs or unfairly misrepresenting your opponent?
Can you walk away from this blog with folded arms comfortably proclaiming to the world I don't like helping people? And indeed, why not take the natural step forward and say this dislike is such that I may actually be endangering them by being trusted with their information and lives! As far as “the world” is concerned, I'm a “random dude” with a week of “training” who a bunch of people I'd spent less than 2 hours total in person with said, “Alright! Shuffle other people's children around the state and invite yourself into their homes as you probe the depths of their minds with our handy questionnaire.” I'm not a therapist. My only license is one to drive a car.
But this system “works” for lack of a better description. Even with your own struggles and prejudices and concerns about your demons, with a basically competent and basically moral random asshole, we've concocted a process that gets to speak to the reunification of families and other improvements in their lives. Do I suspect that's what happens most of the time or that we're even doing it particularly well? Absolutely not. But the relatively nascent stage at which humanity is in regarding human well-being, I'm loathe to criticize it too harshly.
To take my work example and try to tie it to how I opened this, is that barring any particular atrocity, from the daily lives of those my company serves, or grand societal destruction, if there wasn't something there about humanity in spite of whatever ridiculous words and egos want to say about it, we wouldn't even have the opportunity to be doing as good a bad job as we're doing right now. That is, when you're attempting to describe the landscape that we're operating in, if you're “politically correct” about the desperate and indifferent and wanton opinions that have churned us out to this point, you start to think they're not there, and as John Mulaney said, no one can figure out how or why a horse is rampaging in the hospital.
People need to feel offended. They need to feel oppressed. They need to feel like there is no hope, and then they need to see themselves figuring out how to live anyway. That's what we're made of. Whether they'll need to feel it indefinitely into the future, I don't know. But I don't feel driven to change anything when I'm tripping through a comfortable and “matter-of-fact” atmosphere about my place and the means to navigate it. I “desperately” want to die on as many machines and drugs as it takes without thinking about it bankrupting me. I've been “oppressed” by greed and institutional powers relentlessly. A simple victimhood feeling is not predicated on a group identity claim. Even countless incidences that seem to betray that group identity don't speak to the point.
The point is that it's about you. You have to swallow your guilt or your pride. You have to disavow the shame insisted upon you. You have to tap into a meaning-driven flow or fluid structure that speaks for what you'll never be able to. I could write a blog a day decrying the insanity of things I encounter. None of it will ever speak to why I'm not doing 90 down the highway with a kid in the car. Here we must leave aside the perpetual danger we put everyone in with our various other driving distractions, but the point remains the same. You are all, not either/or. You can be black, and only black man on the stage invited to speak over the next 2 hours. You don't look like a victim, even if you are.
You hear often enough in places that claim to believe and care that you don't know someone else's story. They say don't judge. They say keep an even disposition when you're walking into someone's broken house or they're talking to you through broken teeth. What most would describe as victims after a paragraph of what they or their kids have been put through does not mean they carry the same kind of complex you'll insist upon them. Even and especially when they are actually victims.
Equally broke, equally addicted, equally geographically located, equally in a State database and labeled and sorted, the only people who return to normal are the ones who take command of themselves. They show up to the imposed meetings. They fill out the paperwork. They bring the food, even shitty sugar bullshit, but food enough, to their interactions. They ask questions about how to do better. They're scared and confused and frustrated, and what no one has the indecency to say is that they can only “help” so much. We don't grow as a business when we help people. We grow by plausibly deniable billing practices and rushed certifications that allow for the acceptance of more referrals. Do some social workers somewhere some of the time help people? Sure. Is the fix to poverty and addiction bilking the state? Obviously not.
I pick writing this back up after I catch a line from Jordan Peterson saying that first you have to admit something before you open the door for it to potentially being fixed. I think that's the purpose of the ongoing and open discourse. That's the purpose of analyzing and never shutting up. Keep admitting. Keep accepting. Keep throwing in your own face all the reasons it might be you instead of the world. When it is the world, there's still more room to admit what else you might be doing in harm or service. The discourse needs the information from the collective differences, as difficult and misaligned as they're forever perfectly situated. To admit there's a fix, and moreover you could be a part of it, is an optimistic view rarely denoted as such.
One convoluted way or another, in spite of whatever might be wrong with my head, no matter the amount of money I've been fucked over for, the constant hurdle of dying and superficial friends, and wasted effort being incidentally “helpful” doing jobs I hate, I still try to set a kind of basic example. I still write. I still do the job, better than I even care to, or respond to frustrations with more, what feels like excessively hopeless effort, until I burn out. Should my goal to never be a person who burns out? Or is there only a certain span of time I can be what I want to be that the world is going to snuff out too soon regardless? That depends on how much of my experience I want to blame on my birth year or whiteness. That depends on if I'm a victim of circumstance, or an excuse-ridden empathy frother. I'm both. I'm fucked, and trapped, and feel hopeless and alone, and I have everything I do and enjoy daily too. Why can't we be both?
I think once you ask that you're forced to contend with how much of your decision making is just that, your decision. I choose my small daily reality's conception of pragmatism to keep the money coming in too, but I'd stop in a heartbeat if I saw a way forward that worked things like I know they need to work. Would you? No. You choose “this.” You choose silence. I don't know how to fix that. I don't know how to make more offers to those I wish to connect and build with. The chasm between me and finding friends to create something sustainable or affordable or healthy feels like the divide between extremist political groups save for the fact I actually want to connect. I actually want to learn from and share. I don't want to be on some side of a self-righteous dividing line. But here I sit.
Then I'm moved to say you don't want the responsibility. You don't want the burden and risks associated. You don't want something “better” in so many ways abstracted or not. You don't want me. You don't want to try. You don't want to catch one blog over another complaining I'm not moving fast enough. You don't want that anymore than I want to read dozens of proclamations that I'm to blame for the way I look, or to hear an educated black man with millions of views frame his victimhood as a measure of my incapacitated empathy. He's not my victim anymore than you are.
We all have the darkness and coldness of the opening line. Ignore it at your peril. Deny yourself the work of figuring out the “but.” Pretend there's nothing to be done, and I'll go about my business writing to no one in particular.
