This post is available as a podcast here: https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/VrtBFgmNHyb

I like being helpful; a lot of us do. I’m not sure if it’s a feature of the people pleasing, or just something that gives us a sense of purpose and fulfillment. Do all people feel good when they help others? I hope so; I can’t imagine feeling differently. In undergrad, I got really interested in some ideas about “good” vs “evil” and studying human interactions. My first semester of freshman year I was blessed by a class that was called Honors Connections. This was a class designed to connect freshman honors students, and the instructor got to teach a course of their own design. (Honestly, the coolest courses come out of such design.) I had selected a section based on time, but it turned out to be the start of something I would soon dive into deeply.

That class was taught by a religious studies professor who decided to teach the class around the concept of evil. What is evil? How do we measure it? etc. As someone who was raised secular, I loved the class because I didn’t have answers from a religion. I got to draw my own conclusions and learn a lot about people, history, and (of course) evil. We read Glover’s Humanity, and many other books that didn’t leave as big an imprint. I was so completely stunned by the accounts of genocide and mass persuasion that I had to keep learning and digging into it. I struggled to understand how things could ever go so wrong… but it turns out that any, ordinary, person can become a murderer under certain circumstances. That was one of the lessons I learned in all the work I did thereafter.

However, this post is about helping people, not hurting them. Maybe we can dive into that further another day. The instructor from my class on evil ran a class on Altruism towards the end of my degree. Altruism was the other side of the coin; if evil was done through hurting, altruism was done through helping. Helping others even at cost to oneself. Evil was fascinating because it didn’t make sense without critical analysis, but altruism was fascinating because it was good. If we’re on this Earth to do anything – I hope it’s to learn and grow; to be the best version of ourselves. I hope it’s to be as good as we can be. Altruism seemed like a crest to reach for on a path to be good.

Altruism is the act of working to benefit others, even if it costs us something. It doesn’t have to cost us, but it comes from a desire to benefit others. When we act out of selfish interest, we are benefitting ourselves without consideration of others. Altruism is the opposite, we consider the benefits of others without concern for the impact on ourselves. I strive to be altruistic. It’s completely in line with my people pleasing, but it isn’t the same. The people pleasing is to gain acceptance, but altruism is from a desire to help people – no desire for a reward from the actions. The only reward is that I get to see others’ success. Honestly, I love it.

I was labeled as “selfish” a lot in childhood. I was an only child the first 10+ years… I didn’t know how to share. I didn’t understand how to separate my needs from my choices and actions. Honestly, isn’t that part of childhood? We’re too young to understand any needs but our own. One of the classic quotes from St. Augustine we talked about in undergrad proclaimed at the selfishness of babies. The famous quote is about their innocence, but in his confessions he is speaking from his own perspective as a baby. When we are born, we know of no other needs but our own. We are born selfish (and I don’t mean that in a bad way), we learn about community and altruism through the connections we form in family and friendships. Altruism was a new door that I opened in undergrad that changed so much about how I saw people and interacted with them.

As someone who was raised secular, but with examples of good ethics and morals, the religious studies’ courses were fascinating to me. I felt like I came into the courses unbiased and able to apply the academic framework to the teachings and perspectives of different religions. I hadn’t been taught that any of their views were more “right” than another. I wish we all had that blank slate because I felt like it left me open to accepting the various perspectives. I took additional courses in that department, as well as philosophy, to create a minor in ethics. I created my own ethical code through all of that work. Altruism became a goal within that code.

One doesn’t need to be altruistic. In fact, when I took the course on altruism, one of the major discussion points was the benefits of altruism. Some of us wanted to argue that by helping others, we were helping ourselves – even if that wasn’t the goal. Some arguments against would claim something about the impact of the costs – it wouldn’t benefit us to be altruistic to a point where we cost ourselves “too much.” In my communities, I see more altruistic behavior today than I did then. I see people putting belief in each other, supporting each other, and loving each other more than ever. Perhaps it’s the people I’m drawn to, or perhaps there’s a group of us in this world that is growing and learning that when we embrace and lift each other up, we’re all better for it. I hope it’s the latter.

My story this week is about my sibling and silly things that (maybe) you shouldn’t say around kids.

My parents were not the most conservative. I watched the first South Park movie in the theater, and I was WAY too young to understand all the references that happened. (Note to self: rewatch that movie as an adult…) Anyway, my toddler-age sibling was getting exposed to shows like COPS and Beavis and Butthead… So they used to sing “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?!” and pull their shirt over their head and walk around the house saying “I am Cornholio! I need TP for my bunghole!” I’m not trashing my parents, it was cute at the time, but I wouldn’t let my toddler watch those things today. I hope the visual makes you laugh, because it was a highlight of that time and gives me a good chuckle every time I think back to it.

Anyway, here’s my funny story. I was visiting my mom, and my sibling was probably 5ish at the time. This overlapped with their Cornholio time, they were still doing that. Anyway, the upstairs bathroom toilet was having issues. It was making all kinds of weird noises, backing up frequently, etc. I went to use it, and it made a loud gurgling noise that startled me pretty bad. I said through the door to my sibling “that wasn’t me! What’s up with this toilet?! It’s got butt overload or something…” laughs ensued. They loved that, and proceeded to go around impersonating the toilet sounds and proclaiming “Butt overload!” in conjunction with the Cornholio quote. Our age difference made it really hard for us to connect, but sometimes there would be a spark of connection – like “Butt overload!”

Help each other, support each other, and love each other. When all else fails, find some toilet humor.

May your heart and mind open to accepting each other. Love, -S.