How Do You Know What's Good for Other People?

There is a passage in a song I have listened to that asks a question I haven't been able to shake: How do you know what's good for other people?

My immediate reaction is that of course we can know some things are good for other people. Feeding somebody who is hungry is good. Helping somebody who needs help is good. Loving your children, showing up for people and trying to leave something better than you found it all seem like pretty safe territory. I have built a lot of my life around the belief that if I have the ability to help somebody and it costs me relatively little to do it, I probably should.

But the more I think about the question, the less simple it becomes.

I spend a lot of time trying to make things better. Sometimes that means fixing something that is broken, building something somebody needs or giving away something I know how to create. Sometimes it means trying to make myself better. I can identify something I don't like about the way I handled a situation, figure out why I did it, and immediately begin constructing a better version of myself that supposedly won't do it again.

There is a strange amount of confidence hiding inside that.

To improve something, I have to believe I know what improved looks like. To help somebody, I have to believe I know what will help them. To become a better version of myself, I have to decide that the person I am imagining in the future is somehow better than the person sitting here making that judgment right now.

That doesn't mean improvement is bullshit. I don't believe that. There are things about myself I have changed intentionally that I am incredibly grateful I changed, and there are decisions I can point to that unquestionably made my life better. There are also people I have helped in tangible ways, and pretending none of that matters would be just another kind of intellectual game.

What bothers me is the possibility that wanting to do good can make it harder to notice when I am not actually doing good anymore.

Good intentions are incredibly persuasive when they belong to you. I know why I am doing something. I know I mean well. I know I am trying to help, which makes it very easy to use my intention as evidence that the thing itself must be helpful.

Those are not the same thing.

I have been thinking about that recently because I have had to draw boundaries around some of the ways I help people. My instinct has usually been to see something I can fix and fix it. I rarely stop at the beginning and ask whether solving the problem creates another responsibility, whether the person actually wants the kind of help I am offering, or whether helping indefinitely eventually prevents somebody from owning the thing themselves.

Sometimes the most useful thing I can do may be to give somebody something and then get the hell out of the way.

The same question becomes considerably more uncomfortable when I turn it toward myself. I am constantly trying to understand myself better. I want to be more patient, more present, less reactive, a better father, a better husband and generally less likely to create unnecessary problems for myself or anybody around me.

None of those sound like bad goals.

But I wonder how much time a person can spend trying to become better before he accidentally builds his identity around the idea that who he currently is isn't good enough.

There is always another thing to work on. Another reaction I could have handled differently. Another habit I could improve, another part of my personality I could understand, another explanation for why I do something the way I do it. Self-awareness can become its own endless project if I decide every discovery requires reconstruction.

Maybe sometimes the appropriate response to understanding something about myself is simply understanding it.

I don't know.

That may be why the question has stayed with me. I usually like questions that have answers because answers can become plans, and plans can become things I can actually do. "How do you know what's good for other people?" doesn't cooperate with that instinct because any confident answer immediately creates another question.

How do you know?

Maybe there are times when I absolutely should act. There are times when somebody needs help, when I need to change something about myself, or when doing nothing would just be an excuse dressed up as philosophy. I don't think the answer is to stop caring, stop improving or sit around watching life happen because intentions are imperfect.

I think I just want to become a little less certain that wanting to help automatically means I know how.

There are worse things than admitting I don't know what somebody else needs. I can ask. I can listen. I can offer what I have without deciding what they should do with it afterward. I can even look at myself occasionally without immediately reaching for the tools.

Maybe not everything I notice needs to become a project.