Helping Others

I love helping other people, but at the same time, I hate it.

I really like helping others because it gives them joy. When someone helps me out, I feel grateful, and it’s a really great feeling. Why not give others the same feeling?

I hate helping others because I am always afraid I can’t help them. For example, if I promised someone to help them out at a specific time, I am always scared that I can’t keep my promise. It’s not that I can’t, it’s external factors that cause me to fail. For instance, my family, especially my parents. They seem to excercise absolute power.

A recent event has led me to think: "I shouldn’t promise to help anyone anymore." That would definitely solve the problem of breaking promises. But then that leads to another problem: I won’t have any friends. I would be the worst person to know. Moreover, no one would help me when I ask them to.

So I guess the answer is to strike a balance, not to go to either extremes. This is almost always the case for a typical indifference theory problem in Economics. But then the question now becomes: what is the balance point? Should it be exactly in the middle, or a little biased?

Now, maybe the next question would be: is this balance stable? Or would it change over time? If it does, is just a function of time/age, or a function of other things (eg. people, the event, etc.). Then one would have to go further and ask: what are the properties of this function?…

I think I am thinking too much. I think I should stop now…