The Hardest Parts About Being a Good Person
By: Joe Duncan
Tags: Relationships, Self, Philosophy, Growth, Ethics

“Maturity,” says 19th-century philosopher and American poet, naturalist, and champion of civil liberties, Henry David Thoreau, “is when all of your mirrors turn into windows.” This one sentence just has so many layers to it. In one sense, our mirrors that serve us in helping us in our projects of vanity, our internal mental circuit that masks the world in an opaque reflection, tainting it with the jaded tinge of our subjectivity, turns into a clear and translucent gateway to the unhindered and unaffected world around us. We spend so much time in our youths inventing ourselves, struggling to discover who we are, and building our lives and reputations. We need to use mirrors for this process. We need to look inward as we carry ourselves through life on our respective voyages of self-exploration. When we become mature, when we become better and grow into the healthy adults we will (hopefully) inevitably become, the world becomes clear, crisp, and our focus is more on our place in the world, rather than the world’s place in making sure it accurately reflects us.

One of the bittersweet moments of maturation is the sour flavor of learning that not everyone matures at the same rate. All too often, we make it to the mountain top, only to find ourselves isolated and alone. Looking around we realize that others still have a long way to go. The consolation, here, is that we get to grow further as we realize we need to learn the patience and empathy needed to understand others who haven’t quite yet made it to this level. And growth brings its own rewards, even though the difficult and laborious times that we might encounter. I am of the belief that our relationships of all stripes, from familial to romantic relationships, can only possibly be as good as the amount of maturity we reach and our respective partners reach. If there was a relationship ceiling, a point which we could not transcend and it just can’t get any better, that ceiling is built with the raw materials of each partner’s respective maturities. This is how I view human relations. How many of us have been caught up in a relationship where we’ve been waiting for someone else to mature, trying diligently, might I add, and all for what? Only to inevitably leave in the realization that people mature at their own rate and through their own life experiences.

One thing our culture, here in the west, seems seriously devoid of is any sense of virtue ethics. Without diving too far into it, I’ll just say that I believe that we all have a responsibility to be a good person and to constantly strive to become a better person. Both for ourselves and others. What is time but squandered if it isn’t being used to better our lives and the lives of those around us? Of course, this has its limits. We should take time to enjoy ourselves, as well, especially with other people.

Game Theory and Human Ethics

Becoming a better person is a process and one that brings about some challenges of its own. Prisoner’s Dilemma is an interesting little paradox in game theory, an imaginary world wherein two prisoners are accused of a horrible crime. They are questioned in separate concrete rooms, isolated from one another where they cannot communicate or otherwise exchange information. The prosecutors and detectives on the case are trying to get them to confess.

If either one confesses and the other does not, the one who confessed will be released and face no jail time, but the other will be imprisoned for 20 years. If both confess, they’ll both be sentenced to 15 years. If neither of them confesses they’ll be released in just a few short months without charges, for there wasn’t enough evidence to hold them.

It is in each prisoner’s own self-interest to snitch in this hypothetical world, but it’s paradoxically in both of their best interests to stay silent. Becoming a better person is like this, as we grow, the fruits of our growth depend on other people, and their growth as well. But part of being a better person is helping other people grow into more mature people.

One major lesson I’ve learned in life is that just because you have value to offer, doesn’t mean that others are capable of recognizing and understanding that value, especially as valuable. The best violin maker in the world would be useless if he ended up stranded on a deserted island with a remote culture that had no conception of violins or music. This is how being a good person is for many people is, it’s honestly a lot of hard work and a frequent lack of recognition for that hard work. But being a good person is its own reward and is just about always worth it.

It’s a Thankless Job

Being a good person is a thankless job, more often than not. Not a lot of people will recognize the virtuous deeds you do for them. Sometimes, they won’t even know they happened. This is because one of the first steps toward being a good person requires us to carry out good acts, not for recognition’s sake, but for the sake of themselves. Virtue isn’t virtuous because we’ll receive praise, virtue is virtuous because it couldn’t be anything but virtuous without degrading its authenticity. We must push ourselves to become better people until it’s incongruous with our natures to not be good people.

To give you an example of what I mean, when I was 21 years old I entered a restaurant to get myself a nice, hearty burger. In front of me was a patron who was clearly mentally and physically challenged. I couldn’t tell you what growth disorder he suffered from but it was apparent by looking at him. The woman behind the counter was trying her best to explain to him that he was several dollars short of being able to purchase the meal he was asking for, but he wasn’t quite grasping the concept of money needing to be a certain amount before she could give him his sandwich. I raised my hand in the air and got her attention from behind him and held up my card. She got the hint.

She moved him along and I paid for his meal with mine. He got his meal and went about his life in total ignorance of what had just happened. Fifteen years later, and I’ve mostly kept that story to myself. Why would I need to go around bragging about it all the time? Would that really impress anybody? Of course not. That would’ve made me a braggart. But the point here isn’t to brag, it’s to demonstrate how much of what we do in life will be lost in the eyes of others. That’s just how it is, we should accept it, and move on.

But the unseen benefit, here, is that while we won’t be recognized for many of our charitable deeds, we can recognize them as deeds we’ve carried out. When my decency and moral character have been called into question, I can easily remember this moment and moments like it where I delivered to someone who didn’t even know that I’d helped them. It makes it subtly sweeter. But yes, on a whole, being a good person is a thankless job, especially in a society that worships money as the arbiter of all things right or wrong and self-interest above all.

People Will Get Angry with You

Yep, that’s right…people will sometimes get quite angry with you for helping them out. First, there is a rule I live by in life, never help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. I’ll repeat that because it deserves to be repeated: never help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.

People will even come to you and ask for help; they’ll tuck their complaints and grievances under the veil of needing help and ask for help that they never intend to go through with. What they really want to do is complain to someone and they’ve learned — as others have stopped listening because of their constant inaction — that if they pretend that they’re actually going to utilize the time and effort you put into their problem, they can easily get a lending ear in an exchange that feels like it’s about even. But what happens when you follow up with this kind of person? They’ll get angry with you, invariably. They feel put on the spot, pressured to achieve, when all they really wanted was to vent and bitch about what’s going wrong with their lives.

The best thing we can do is avoid this kind of person. They’re emotional black holes who’ll need to learn that they have potency and the ability to affect change in their lives. Learned helplessness is real and it will render you helpless if you try to help people who don’t want to be helped.

The other kind of person who’ll get angry with you is the person who, no matter what you’ve done for them, it’s never good enough. The need is always bigger than what it is that you do or give. Someone might need help with rent money, having fallen on challenging times, and they ask us, and we throw down an extra $20 for their cause. But then they get angry and bitter about the fact that they aren’t likely to make it. These people aren’t capable of even recognizing your self-sacrifice. Their entire world’s focus circles around themselves, like a them-centric universe, and they can’t even fathom putting the lens outside of themselves enough to understand that you were a supportive person, because their goals failed or might fail in the future.

This person is a resource drain. They have a long way to go before they can conceptualize virtuous actions as being somehow more important than material gains or losses. Our culture is deceptive in this way, it preaches unwavering materialism, yet, that materialism is propped up by the actions which serve as the causes that create the material affects. It’s illusory to only view the material as existent and important, but alas, most people do.

People Won’t Understand How You’ve Helped Them

Another hard part about being a good person is the fact that, depending on the situation, many (most?) people won’t even understand that you’ve helped them or how much you’ve helped them. Case in point, do you remember every teacher you had in school who taught you the basics that apply to your everyday life? Not likely, especially when we’re talking about the earlier grades in our younger years. The same goes for all sorts of life teachers and great people who help us out along the way. What about the local librarians who help keep the flow of knowledge running freely? What about all the people keeping the food supply streaming to keep us fed? So many roles go into structuring society so we can have what we have, yet we don’t even know they exist.

This too takes place on a personal level. You might give someone advice or help them with something they need help with, and it won’t be until years later that they realize just how much you’ve, in fact, helped them out.

This is because goodness is dependent upon a complimentary goodness being able to understand and recognize that good as good. Aristotle pointed out that virtue must be able to recognize complementary and alternative virtues that are different from it, otherwise it isn’t truly virtue. An excellent basketball player isn’t an excellent basketball player if they can’t recognize the value of an excellent football player. Greatness must be recognized trans the spectrum of human abilities, otherwise, it’s nothing at all.

This means that most people won’t be capable of recognizing the value we bring to the table if they don’t bring to the table a similar value or are incapable of seeing that value as valuable; as at least most values are subjectively determined (Sartre, Nietzsche), valuation becomes a skill and something we need to practice, something we need to learn and, hopefully, eventually master. Being able to recognize value is just as important of a skill as being able to create it, regardless of the modes or mediums we choose to see or create, nonetheless, proper valuing (as an action) is as important as proper, critical thinking. Just being brutally honest, here, because of this fact, when people become good people, virtuous people, they become the object of the eyes of scorn and envy of those who aren’t yet virtuous.

Because those who aren’t virtuous cannot recognize that virtue, rather often, and when they can, they become frustrated that such goodness shines, like a mirror upon them, making them question their own actions — this is uncomfortable, like the sunlight beaming through a mirror and reflecting onto an emotional vampire, a lot of people tend to recoil from this experience. Ironically, this is the opposite of what we need to do, which is to accept that the only way to truly grow is to accept that we could be better people and learn from those who already are where we’d like to be. This is the fundamental law of choosing to grow as people. But I leave this here as a fair warning to those who would like to pound the path of becoming their own version of personal excellence, it won’t be without its challenges.