Doing good doesn’t guarantee it back
By: Aravindh Kumar
Tags: Humanity, Life Lessons, Reflections, Self Improvement, Life

The age old saying “Karma is a boomerang” sounds good, most of us would have a story or at least heard one which reinforces it. A brief explanation of this adage would be — You did an action and apart from the short term consequences, you think that somehow the ‘universe’ will remember and it will come back to bite you in the behind or pat you on the shoulder. Most of us accept this to be true and base our actions and beliefs on it; This makes people in-general a tad bit better and less self-centred.

This has more to do with how we look at correlation and causation. Let’s take an example, say you like to sit beside the window and read books at your leisure. You observe something strange happening. This is exactly what you see — When people on the street carry an umbrella with them, it rains. This always holds good, like every time you see people running around with umbrellas, it rains. This could be an absolutely earth shattering finding. So according to you, all we(as a species) have to do to stop droughts is to make it mandatory for people to carry umbrellas with them.

While reading the above scenario you would have smiled and thought who would be so dumb to come to this kind of a conclusion. People carrying umbrellas and the act of rain are correlated — they will happen together most of the time. Here is the most important part of this whole illustration, direction of causation— the probability of rain(or at least the dark clouds) is the cause for the appearance of umbrellas and not the other way around. It looks so obvious to us here but not so obvious in everyday life.

Now let’s boomerang back to Karma. Consider you did a good deed just for the pleasure you get out of helping others and another person did the same thing but just for social media and didn’t enjoy it even a little bit. The latter would get attention and praise from a wider audience than the former. Whom do you think will get the Karmic benefit in their life ?

The answer is neither. Let’s shelf the Karma points table system which aggregates your overall (good & bad)deeds in life and consider just this one event to keep things simple. And don’t even get me started on our inter-birth Karma points or the points of our ancestors being bestowed upon us.

The deeds’s intended result for you is satisfaction and for the other person is people adoring and complementing them in their post. Both of their needs are met. Now going into the unintended consequences(which we attribute to Karma) is where we can let our imaginations run wild and connect events which are in no way even related to the deed. We would have seen dozens of videos where a small help goes around and comes back to help the person who started it. For things to work out that perfectly is impossible and you would only be fooling yourself by telling something happened because of your actions a few years back.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter if you do a good thing. Of-course it does, even if it just brings a smile on another person’s face, it’s what this world needs now. Post your good deeds on social platforms, so that someone gets inspired to get out and do positive things. Doing good things produces ‘happy hormones’ such as Oxytocin, Serotonin and Dopamine in our body which improves our mental and physical health — that satisfaction you get, that’s because of these hormones. So the more often you help out, more doses you’ll get of them.

All I’m trying to say is — Help others in anyway possible; Do good deeds as much as you as possibly can with the reason being that it make you feel good and not just in expectation of some payoff at a later point in your life or don’t get disappointed/turn bitter saying life has been unfair to you in-spite of all the things you did. Be a positive force because you can make a difference, not because it could remediate for the bad things you did or would do — it won’t.